http://arstechnica.com/business/201...al-google-results-to-bottom-12-of-the-screen/
*heads over to wolframalpha.com
New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen
Google said it'd never do it, but new ads aren't shy about taking up browser windows.
by Casey Johnston - Oct 24 2013, 1:40pm EDT
Actual search results are in the un-grayed area.
Google has started adding banner ads to its search result pages, SearchEngineLand reportedWednesday. And they're not just skinny banner ads abutting the top edge of a page; in at least one case, users are treated to a big honking sponsored box dominating the site. In the case of Southwest Airlines, the banner ads mean only a paltry 12 percent of your browser window is dedicated to the search results you came looking for.
SearchEngineLand has already pointed out that these ads are Google reneging on a promise it made eight years ago in a company blog post. “No banner ads on the Google homepage or Web search results pages… ever,” the post read. The statement was in response to a “strategic alliance” between AOL-Time Warner and Google, wherein Google and AOL would share more content between themselves, and AOL would make its content more crawl-able to fuel Google’s search results.
Here is what Google search results looked like in 2005:
Enlarge / MY EYES.
wigblog.blogspot.com
They're hideous by today's standards, but these are mostly straightforward search results with a couple of sponsored links to the side.
The format of the post containing Google's banner ad edict could be construed as referring to ads specifically for that partnership. However, the bullet point talking about banner ads does not hedge about extenuating circumstances. No banner ads, ever. But along comes 2013.
After one of the banner ads was spotted by @SynrgyHQ on Twitter, Google responded by saying that it is a “brand image experiment” that is being tested with 30 companies advertising with Google. Southwest Airlines is one; Crate & Barrel and Virgin America are two others. We’ve found that Incognito mode in Chrome seems to pull up the banner ads with a much higher success rate.
The new banner ad for Southwest Airlines that Google is testing. According to Google, it now appears in about 5 percent of queries.
Google has stated that the banner ads are only an experiment, and it refused to comment on how the ads would be formatted. The new Crate & Barrel and Virgin pages we viewed were not marked with sponsored boxes and thus may not be the banner ad format. But they do differ from the typical search results pages, which normally include a large, unsponsored sidebar with the company’s Google+ page.
The banner-ad Southwest Airlines search results page, however, is indeed mostly a very large “sponsored” box (the large link and the six below it are contained within it, bounded by a shaded border). The content of the ad is the same as the first result for a search for Southwest Airlines (what I see, anyway). It’s just about twice as wide and about 50 percent longer than the usual search result entry, with a large image advertising southwest.com.
As a result, with a browser window maximized on a monitor with 1080 lines of resolution, only 12.45 percent of the screen is dedicated to unsponsored search results. The screenshot above is 1023 pixels long. The first search result, which is actually a collection of results from Google news, squeezes into the bottom 117 pixels. This breakdown obviously varies with monitor size and zoom level, but either way, actual search results, which used to be most of the page, are now effectively off-screen.
As for the full-width first-result bars on the Crate & Barrel and Virgin pages, the first search results below that full-width bar appear 833 pixels down the page, or 81 percent of the way down the page.
In terms of relevancy, it’s very likely that most people who are searching for these terms are in fact looking for the company site and pages offered by the result featured in the sponsored box. But those who come to Google for more egalitarian search results are effectively shown a near-full-page interstitial ad.
Enlarge / Mobile ads get pretty hefty real estate on mobile these days.
The rollout of banner ads comes only days after Google’s most recent earnings call, where financial results showed that Google is struggling with falling mobile ad sales prices. As The New York Timesreported, Google sells mobile ads for half to two-thirds as much as desktop ads, but the mobile ads are only a third to a quarter as effective. It bears mentioning that before scrolling, real search results on mobile don’t get much real estate, either.
Google will not publicly address any aspect of the banner ad experiment beyond saying that it is a “very limited, US-only test, in which advertisers can include an image as part of the search ads that show in response to certain branded queries.” Even if Google does change the format, we would not be surprised to see the ads stick around.
*heads over to wolframalpha.com
