Google gives ads a little more juice

August 17, 2005 | Michael Bazeley | Comments | |

A reader pointed us to fact that Google appears to have upped the number of ads it displays atop its search results. Sure enough, Google confirms that for highly commerical searches, it’s now going to display as many as three ads atop its search page, up from two before. The change took effect in the last week. (We’ve seen it intermittently.)

Google is pulling up an extra high-performing ad from its ad stack on the side of search results and moving it to the more promiment top-center placement. Google’s argument is that, for commercial searches, such as “DVD player,” ads are often as relevant to searchers as the regular search results.

“Google is always working on improving the user experience and ad effectiveness,” spokesman Mike Mayzel told us. “For highly commercial queries, we believe an additional ad above the search results is good for both.”

Yahoo limits the number of ads above search results to four, although two or three ads is more common.

It’s a small tweak for Google, to be sure. But noteworthy given Google’s famously uncluttered user interface and its commitment to usability. Will users notice the change?

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  • if they really want to make it more relevent, why not add froogle results in there, instead of another ad? it's about the money, not relevency.

    Come clean Google!
  • Anil
    It seems Google is slowly starting to copy Yahoo. Maybe you might want to write an article on this - how Google copied the My Yahoo model, now is placing ads similar to Yahoo in search results. Is it a testament that Yahoo got the model right and Google is having a hard time trying to truly come up with something different?