Google Cleans Up Search Results By Ditching Sidebar Ads (theverge.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Google generates a huge amount of revenue through advertising but it's not afraid to try mixing things up a little. Ads in search results have long-been controversial, but the latest change is likely to go down well with many people -- the ads that currently appear in the right-hand sidebar of search results are to be dropped.

The change means that ads will only be displayed above and below search results. There will be seven Google AdWords ads in total -- four above the search results and three below. The right-hand side of the page will be left free for Google's own Product Listing Ads. Google also confirmed that the change is global and affects all languages.

Comments

Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

From a user's perspective, isn't the sidebar an ideal place for ads so they don't mix in with search results?

Re:Confused

[pushing-robot]

Yes, that's the problem.

Re:Confused

[WarJolt]

so they don't mix in with search results?

Exactly, they want to confuse you. Why would they do anything that would decrease ad revenue? It's probably easier to trick folks into clicking when they aren't aware of the ads.

Re:Confused

[gnupun]

That's like the yahoo! homepage that randomly mixes article headlines and ads. The ads have a light blue background color, but unless you correctly angle your screen, the background color looks white, like the article headline's background. Both headlines and ads have the same look and format.

How the heck can companies get away with such blatant deception?

Re:Confused

[Noah Haders]

> There will be seven Google AdWords ads in total -- four above the search results and three below.

so now there will be 17 search results shown, ten of which are organic and seven of which are keyword-targeted ads. 59% signal to noise ratio, go google! keep up the stellar work! meanwhile i'll be at duckduckgo.com along with everybody else.

Re:Confused

[Noah Haders]

I think the trick to use ddg as the default, and when you need to jump the google, use the bang. So when I find I'm not getting the results I'm looking for, I add a "!g" to the search box and jump directly to google.

Re:Confused

[Zanadou]

Or just use startpage.com.

Google has ads?

[110010001000]

I've never seen any ads on Google. The right hand side is completely blank. Are there people that don't run adblockers in 2016?

Re:Hello, new owners?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Here's the problem.

If Slashdot ownership decides to keep posting submitted stories as-is, some people are going to complain about perceived biases in the stories.

If Slashdot ownership chooses to have their editors rewrite the submissions before they're posted, some people will start complaining that Slashdot is controlling the news and attempting to put its own spin on everything. ... and I expect the Venn Diagram of the two groups would mostly overlap.

Re:Before vs after

[whipslash]

Here's an after photo: http://www.thesempost.com/wp-c... (this one shows Google product listings in the right sidebar.) If it doesn't surface a product listing then the right sidebar is blank. The before only had 3 search ads on top, and then more in the sidebar.

The top ads are the worst

[fulldecent]

I run a website, it is called acls.net. Lots of people compete with us.

Sometimes we will get a customer on the phone that got our phone number from a friend and they want to login and buy our course. I tell them to type acls.net into the address bar. Just explaining where the address bar was hard enough. One older gentleman finally types it in and guess what... he lands on our competitor's website!

So then we go through this again. Type it in... hit enter... and then same result. So what happened is this guy is getting to the Google search results page and our competitor created an ad with the headline "acls.net". Luckily I figured this out, then just told him to click on acls.net that is green.

Turns out this guy is color blind. After 15-minutes of him patiently and whole-heartedly working with me, I could not get him to navigate to our 8-character URL website. I printed out the page and mailed it to him, and he mailed me a check for about $500 to sign up.

This is a real story, honest. Now think about how much money my competitors want to pay Google to make sure the customer that DIDN'T call me ends up on their site...

Re:The top ads are the worst

[fulldecent]

The product on our website is for doctors and I seriously doubt Slashdotters want to buy it. You can check my posting history, I rarely talk about work or promote anything other than my open source projects.

I am glad you're engaged to check that out. Yes, this industry (any competitive industry) has lots of scams. And I provided that link so you can see the kind of shady shit that's going on. Of course, Google encourages all this and they make lots of money from this exact situation. As to why my company is the good guy and most others are scams, you can PM me if you want to hear the details about that.