Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 142 posts

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#111

Post by r0h1n »

Recoil42 wrote: post #65
anon1385 wrote: post #31

Page and Brin themselves once pointed out the problems of accepting ads or paid placement, with some rather ironic examples: Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad,…

>If people searching for Southwest Airlines on Google aren't ending up on the Southwest Airlines website without a huge great banner ad (despite it being ranked at the top of the results) then something is going badly wrong on the Google search results page. Or maybe they are, and this is simply an example of a branding bonus/partnership for big spenders. We have no idea what the economics are and why.

Many companies also spend serious money to buy the topmost text ad for searches on their own brands/URLs. Even when they're #1 organically.

What branding benefit can there be in showing a text ad to a user who is already searching for your website?

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#112

Post by r0h1n »

ryanhuff wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be fallout from trademark owners losing their various lawsuits against Google for allowing competitors to advertise on their trademark as keyword. (See this article: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2013/05/google_crushes.... ) So now they may be the top organic result (or even a navigation result) but JetBlue or United or whatever can buy a banner on top that has their airline telling the searcher how m…

If they follow through with what you suggest, I wonder if it will be the straw that breaks the camels back in regards to an antitrust lawsuit by the government.

Why should that be the case? Google had defended and won most cases around the world where brands accused it of allowing competitors to show ads against their keyword searches. Why should banner ads be treated any differently by antitrust regulators?

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#113

Post by indiefan »

Sad that the user is being lost in these discussions. I get that people are worried about a slippery slope and boundaries, but this is clearly a better user experience for someone who searched for Southwest Airlines. Put yourself in the position of a human being who just performed a search for Southwest Airlines, would you honestly be angry with that result? No, of course not.

It's ironic that every time one of these "omg, google is pushing organic search results off the page" posts comes up, it's the general public who's obsessed with dollars, whereas Google seems to be concerned for the user. Google makes a ton of money off of advertising because they know how to provide useful user experience. Which isn't surprising really, they have a lot more vested interest in making sure they provide such an experience than arstechnica do.

Sure they want to find ways to align their incentives with the user's incentives, but come on people: think of the people they saved clicking through to www.cheapair.com and www.insanelycheapflights.com

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#114

Post by Snoptic »

cbhl wrote: post #110
vxNsr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue as I see it is that when I click on an ad, I'm not just clicking on another link, I'm adding a bunch of extra cookies to my browser that now track my experience and try to target me even more. By removing the organic search result you've essentially given me no choice, now I HAVE to click on the cookie generating link, and I HAVE to deal with all that fall out, I might begin searching with Private Browsing…

All of the links off google.com (including organic ones!) actually redirect you through a google server to: 1. track which one you clicked 2. remove the referer (sic.) field so that the target website doesn't know what search terms you used Also, you should consider using the Chrome App Launcher for Windows and Mac OS X.

Https sites keep the referer header

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#115

Post by Someone »

r0h1n wrote: post #111
Recoil42 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If people searching for Southwest Airlines on Google aren't ending up on the Southwest Airlines website without a huge great banner ad (despite it being ranked at the top of the results) then something is going badly wrong on the Google search results page. Or maybe they are, and this is simply an example of a branding bonus/partnership for big spenders. We have no idea what the economics are and why.

Many companies also spend serious money to buy the topmost text ad for searches on their own brands/URLs. Even when they're #1 organically. What branding benefit can there be in showing a text ad to a user who is already searching for your website?

I know little of that business, but isn't that just "if we buy that space, none of our competitors can have it"?

Also, they could better point customers to special offers, etc.

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#116

Post by rossriley »

Someone wrote: post #115
r0h1n wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies also spend serious money to buy the topmost text ad for searches on their own brands/URLs. Even when they're #1 organically. What branding benefit can there be in showing a text ad to a user who is already searching for your website?

I know little of that business, but isn't that just "if we buy that space, none of our competitors can have it"? Also, they could better point customers to special offers, etc.

Yes, in media buying, this is known as brand protection. It ensures that customers who already are searching for your brand and are therefore more likely to convert don't disappear off to a competitor.

Hence ironically companies will often pay more per click for these results than on more unrelated keywords.

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#118

Post by kbenson »

nl wrote: post #100
spankalee wrote: post #87

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler I think this is a pretty disingenuous analysis of what's going on. It's obvious from the comparison to the [Virgin America] search that this is a bigger change that just adding a "banner ad". Notice that for [Virgin America] there are _two_ spots that bring you to virginamerical.com, the ad and the first organic result. This is redundant, wastes space, and probably is confusing to some users…

Oh wow.. From my point of view the point here is the "Chinese Wall"[1] that used to exist between organic results and paid advertising. That used to be clearly defined, and the trust that came from that was one of Google's strengths. The way the "Sponsored" result hides the organic result for [Southwest Airlines] (by scrolling it off the page) makes that wall redundant - effectively Google is being paid for any click…

To me, it just looks like southwest paid money to put a picture on top of the (awesome, IMO) google provided first result and deep links into relevant sections of the first result site.

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I search for a site and get nav links into it's main sections, because it's invariably much easier to navigate than the site's own navigational system. I have no problem letting Google sell a little extra space above this nav section, especially since it only seems to appear when the result returned are related predominantly that that first site. I.e. Google doesn't appear to be doing this for the search "airlines", but does as soon as the search is definitive enough to identity a specific airline.

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#119

Post by e12e »

spankalee wrote: post #87

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler I think this is a pretty disingenuous analysis of what's going on. It's obvious from the comparison to the [Virgin America] search that this is a bigger change that just adding a "banner ad". Notice that for [Virgin America] there are _two_ spots that bring you to virginamerical.com, the ad and the first organic result. This is redundant, wastes space, and probably is confusing to some users…

Maybe Google should just add an (opt in?) option to advertisers: if you're the top result, and would normally have an ad on the page -- we don't show any ads but charge for the click on the regular result.

That way you still can't rank #1 by paying for it, but Google gets to present a better UI to the users (less redundant information - less confusion).

edit: On a related note - what's the average revenue per user for Google search -- or how much would they have to charge for an ad-free version? (Ok, that probably wouldn't work, every "ad-free" user would devalue the market for ads) -- but still -- how well would a 10USD/year ad-free Google experience sell? Surely that's much higher than average income per user/year in ads?

Re: New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

#120

Post by aw3c2 »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #74
tyree732 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider an alternate universe where Southwest Airlines has a worse reputation due to a variety of bad practices they've engaged in. These banner ads have the potential for pushing many hits describing these practices further down the page, stifling the ability for organic results to properly reflect public opinion on a company.

As pointed out below, these images aren't "pushing" anything down anything. They are about the same height as the stuff they replaced. http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2013/10/...

Uhm, in that image there is another search result pushed off the bottom of the page.
Post reply on HN