I know that a lot of members here own directories. I'm wondering if how many people have increased their site income by replacing the directory search with Google's search. We are going to launch a few new Japanese Directories & think it's not a problem for Japanese to see a google search box & start to search but I wanted to hear other's stories... Any success, complaints?, loss of traffic?
I tried it for about 5 minutes. I thought it looked ugly and spammy and I felt it would be confusing rather than helpful to my visitors so I dumped it. Elsewhere on this forum, people who were more patient or persistent than I kept AdSense Search for longer. Most reported pathetically low click rates and close to zero income from it. My conclusion: If you like displaying Google ads in a format which provides your visitors with spammy looking cluttered search results for little or no financial return from the Google ads, then go for it. If you prefer not to piss your visitors off and hope that some of them may stay on your site long enough to actually buy something from you and/or to return to your site another day and/or to leave your site with an impression that it is a professional website and business, then forget about AdSense Search. Or in other words, I'm a bit ambivalent about it...
My experience with it has been very positive. I have a directory where almost none of the traffic comes to the front page, so people aren't really searching my directory anyway, they got to an interior page by a web search. The google box is front and center and the numbers I get for it are on par with a regular adsense placement. If I really wanted them to search my directory, I'd do away with the google search since it would be confusing. If I could pre-populate the search box, I bet the CTR would be even higher since people are lazy but that would be against the TOS so I don't. :-(
Actually on our Japanese directory I also was going to leave the homepage search as is & use the displayed links & category pages with Google search...
Sort of related: I replaced searching on my blog with AdSense search. Most of these searches that I get are for things that simply aren't on my blog, so I didn't really care about how it looked. I haven't heard any complaints, and I've made a few pennies to boot.