Google Tests "Commercial" Results In Organic Listings

[iShopHQ]

Article Here

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3528611

[GuyFromChicago]

"A Google spokesperson assured ClickZ News the results are not paid listings, saying the demarcated results are a search relevancy experiment. "

[iShopHQ]

Yeah, I read that.....

Honest officer. I only had two beers. And that was hours ago!

They're not paid listings..... yet. HOpefully they never will be

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by iShopHQ

They're not paid listings..... yet. HOpefully they never will be

I hope we don't see the day when they mix paid and "organic" results. Who knows though....

[longcall911]

Originally Posted by GuyFromChicago

I hope we don't see the day when they mix paid and "organic" results. Who knows though....

I agree. I used to use Dogpile and Webcrawler. Then they introduced sponsored listings. I stopped using them. Now, they're 100% paid inclusion and no one cares because no one at all uses them.

I get about 300 uniques a day in my niche market, and in the past year I think I've gotten one dogpile referral and definitely no webcrawler or metacrawler. I suspect that their only visitors are clickbots.

/*tom*/

[d360]

I just seen another post at http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index....anic_listings/

that appears to say the same.

[expat]

I think these are simple tests to get results for further commercialising above the fold.

The squeeze is on with Y M A gaining and investors wanting more.....

Expat

[Sharpseo]

I saw an example of this yesterday while doing a search, it was a big old block in the middle of the results. It was instantly obvious to me that it was an advertisement, not "mixed" results.

What worries me is that these top ads, side ads, and middle of search ads could really take a chunk out of natural traffic that publishers receive.

Of course, some users would be more inclined to use other search engines. And Ad Blocking software would probably become more prevelant over time. Implementing it would probably mean bigtime $ in the short term, big negative over the long term, in my opinion.

[hajamie]

I'd switch to msn. i hate yahoo more than m$

[Old Welsh Guy]

There have been rulings about not making paid adverts clearly recognisable as such. I fear we are drifting towards overkill on Google. well over half the average joe surfer does not know what a 'sponsored link' means. I have asked many many people about it and the bulk of them did not realise that these were paid ads that were there purely because they pay to be.

If these people find that the sponsored ads are not as good as they used to be, then google will suffer. MSN are poised to pounce on the search market with the launch of their next round of OS & Office software. Google had better spend a little more time focussing on relevancy.

[nevetS]

That's how google got big in the first place - less crap than the other SE's and when they included adwords, they were not hugely annoying. We'll see what happens, but getting too greedy opens the door for other SE's.