Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/24/google-breaks-promise-banner-ads-search-results

by saurabh • 13 years ago

245 205 13 years ago

theguardian.com

wodow• 13 years ago

Are there any example URLs?

https://www.google.com/search?q=SouthWest%20Airlines doesn't do it for me at the moment, from the UK.

jmduke• 13 years ago

The banner ad (I hesitate to describe it as that, since its so clean) appears for me in the US.

pmelendez9• 13 years ago

Well.. it is a banner and the company is paying for it so it is an ad. In my opinion the cleanness of the banner should not interfere with the description of being an ad.

randlet• 13 years ago

This is addressed directly in the article. "We're currently running 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."

petepete• 13 years ago

I think "certain branded queries" are the key words here; if that style of banner is displayed for more generic searches (simply 'Airlines', for example) I think people would quickly become frustrated with the experience and move on.

When searching for a particular airline, being confronted with a photograph of one of their aeroplanes isn't the end of the world.

jdmichal• 13 years ago

The article specifically called out that this is a US-only test. That said, I also do not see any banner on this particular search.

danso• 13 years ago

So how much of the reluctance to use banner ads can be attributed to Mayer, or, the subsequent reneging to her leaving? The screenshot follows kind of the same look of Google+'s banner (er Facebook's), so since + is supposed to be the new thing, and it has space for gaudy banners, why not throw it on search too?

Still, seems like a slightly regressive strategy...I thought the traditional Google Homepage was becoming less of a revenue driver compared to all the other way results are traffic driver?

judk6• 13 years ago

Corporations can't make promises. People do.

AJ0074• 13 years ago

Google has gotten much more aggressive amount monetizing their existing inventory. They have been rapidly iterating Adsense unit designs that were fixed for 6+ years.

Search engine optimizers (of which I'm not one) have been terrified as they've watched ads creep over the search results and new elements push organic listings lower and lower.

7952• 13 years ago

At least banner ads are obviously adverts. It can be quite difficult to differentiate between ads and searches in certain situations (like tilted screens).

TomGullen• 13 years ago

Corporate promises aren't worth a dime as history has shown repeatedly. In fact, corporations (especially large ones) can't ever be trusted for pretty much anything and anything they say or do you should always react sceptically by default. They just don't care, and this lack of caring is an inevitability for growing corporations.

Granted some might consider this to be a minor breach of a promise, some might not. The point still stands.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

No, no, no.

You can absolutely trust them if they are say "we are doing this to maximize profits for our share holders / owners".

Then, what is this expectation that one should be able to trust them to do anything else at all? Surely the mere existence of consumer law should tell us something.

anon13853• 13 years ago

You can absolutely trust them if they are say "we are doing this to maximize profits for our share holders / owners".

Eh, not necessarily. Enron executive said what they were doing was to maximise share holder value, but really it was to maximise their own wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud

DjangoReinhardt• 13 years ago

Not the first time, I must add.

When Orkut was all the rage, Google claimed that Orkut would never be merged with the Google core and would remain separate to Google.

The same seems tobe happening with YouTube. Sure, they still allow users to keep their YT & Google identities separate but IDK how long that will last.

Remember when they claimed their motto was 'Don't be evil'?

(NB: Before you come screaming at me for making vague accusations, please take that previous sentence with a pinch of '/s'. Thank you.)

rajivtiru• 13 years ago

Umm they forced me(as in I wasn't able to use youtube otherwise) to connect my Google account to my Youtube so...that is pretty much combining the accounts in my book.

I think, they just needed that to collect my aggregate search+video watching behavior for ad targeting, which they got.

DanBC• 13 years ago

The company gained attention when it started in 1998 because its opening search page, and following results page, was uncluttered by adverts and other elements

Google isn't what it was, and Google wants many more users than they can get from keeping just the early adopters.

People use Google like a portal. This is just Google giving in.

hughes• 13 years ago

If that's a banner ad, it's the most relevant, pleasant, and appropriate banner ad I've ever seen. It's directly related to the search term and is not obnoxious in the least.

If all ads were such high quality I'd have no problems with this (but would still probably use adblock!).

bovermyer• 13 years ago

I agree completely. I'm not opposed to banner ads as long as they are relevant to my present task.

Nor do I take issue with Google changing its stance in this way. Corporations change with the times.

mknits• 13 years ago

Their tagline should be changed to - "Be Evil".

jakozaur3• 13 years ago

Over the years Google is way more aggressive with ads then it used to be.

For any query less and less percentage of first page is dedicate to organic example.

E.g. a silly example: https://www.google.com/search?q=trash+can 25-30% organic, rest are the adds.

gabemart• 13 years ago

That's strange. Even without an ad blocker, I see 0 ads on that SERP.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Ads (as well as other results) are very personalized. I don't see any ads either.

raldi11• 13 years ago

Can you post a screenshot? I don't see what you describe when I click the link.

Also, do you get better results on another search engine? If so, which one?

buo• 13 years ago

I see plenty of ads:

http://imgur.com/bMUkCwi

The same search on DDG gets me exactly one ad.

jakozaur3• 13 years ago

http://imgur.com/ddGJeaI

Most of keywords with any commercial potential looks similar.

Unfortunately, I tried using other search engines, but for technical questions Google still provide superior experience.

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

Only one ad without Adblock. http://i.imgur.com/pQqF9uz.png

Maybe check to see if you have some malware inserting ads?

pfortuny• 13 years ago

Google's result do not follow a person-agnostic algorithm, so he may get 20 ads and you only 1. As a matter of fact, I get none.

anon13853• 13 years ago

What ads you see will vary a lot by location. For example here in the UK 'trash can' returns no ads at all for me. On the other hand 'rubbish bin' results in a page with 8 visible ads and only 3 visible organic search results: http://i.imgur.com/7frlR2J.png

jeffclark2• 13 years ago

In related news: I am no longer with my college girlfriend, despite the fact that 8 years ago I told her I would never leave her.

pmelendez9• 13 years ago

And... Did you leave her? or just break up as a common agreement? In legalese language, I am pretty sure that a promise is synonym of contract, and contracts might be dissolved if both sides of the contract agreed.

This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal, since people change is regrettable but OK to break promises to ourselves sometimes when the interest of the goal had changed.

raldi11• 13 years ago

In legalese language, I am pretty sure that a promise is synonym of contract

You are 100% wrong.

recuter• 13 years ago

So Google broke up with early adopters. Apt.

emehrkay• 13 years ago

This is exactly the problem people are having with Google. We/they have this ideal of what they thought Google was/should-be and Google isn't/haven't-been-completely living up to it.

mapgrep• 13 years ago

Good to know that the company that holds my email, appointments, two-factor-auth, credit card number, and search data has the reliability of a flaky college freshman.

Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).

jol• 13 years ago

Agree about freshman, just wanted to add, that this freshman has managed to do other not so nice things recently, thus increasing cumulative damage to the reputation well beyond sum of each part. I assume that at some point powerusers will start to migrate to different services, when/if competitive enough offer comes

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

Hitler promised not to invade Czechoslovakia, Jeremy. Welcome to the real world!

jeffclark2• 13 years ago

Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations

At some point, people realize that corporations exist to maximize profit and not necessarily for the good of the customer.

d23• 13 years ago

As it turns out, corporations are made up of people and, like people, have the tendency to change.

moogleii• 13 years ago

A promise made by Marissa Mayer, who, as most of us know, works elsewhere now. Sure, the promise was arguably on behalf of the company, but "under her watch" is also arguably implied.

brymaster• 13 years ago

Reading this is a breath of fresh air from the traditional "defend Google or other corporations at all costs" type comments. Maybe now we can drop the meme that Google is some altruistic entity and realize that ~97% of their revenue is from advertising. This is why they exist.

It's now just a matter of time before paid inclusion results show up in the organic SERPs like Yahoo used to have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_inclusion

Edit: Whoops they already broke that promise too!

http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...

The best part is in Google's original IPO filing they promised not to ever accept money for inclusion of results:

"Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating."
"We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising."
"Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge."
"We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see."

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125041...

Times sure have changed!

Dylan168073• 13 years ago

That's just puffery. Everyone understands it to be based upon a continued mutual attraction, but the situation changed.

The advertising situation hasn't changed, and promising no banner ads is not puffery.

_ea1k• 13 years ago

One could argue that the advertising situation has changed. Back in 2005, the types of banner ads that they opposed were heavy, often Flash driven punch-the-monkey junk.

Now, they are putting non-animated (from the samples that I have seen) banners that are completely relevant to your search.

Does that argument hold up? I don't really think it does. But maybe that is their angle?

gauravpandey• 13 years ago

If you find contradiction between my two statements then you can accept the latter, as I am also evolving. -M. K. Gandhi

macspoofing• 13 years ago

Touche! =)

wnevets3• 13 years ago

If I search for southwest airlines, is that image truly a banner ad?

pmelendez9• 13 years ago

In the moment when Southwest airlines paid for it is an advertising piece indeed. And to remove any shadow of doubt if you can't see a similar image when you search for American Airlines or Jetblue then it is clear that Google is favouring results against other companies in the same industry.

wnevets3• 13 years ago

My point is if I search for jetblue and I dont get the southwest image that's not a banner ad, at least not in the traditional sense. If fact if you search for southwest without being in this test group you'll see a southwest image on the right side. Is that a banner ad, if so these images are old news.

Now if I were to search for plane tickets and get the southwest image, that's a banner ad.

yeukhon• 13 years ago

If it is relevant to my search and the image gives better impression of the product, I am okay with that. Though people forget about their promises. But I am against having multiple banners. I am okay with say "search Amazon" and return amazon's latest banner on thanksgiving sale deal. Just one, a good one, reasonable size, and that's it.

nandhp• 13 years ago

Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find a specific brand. This box provides information about that brand. The brand owner is sponsoring this collection of content, some of which would appear even without this sponsorship. The brand owner is compensating Google and providing images and other content relevant to the brand.

This is replacing Southwest's search result. It's noteworthy to me that only "some" of this content would appear without sponsership. So not only are they showing "banner ads" in search results (that's a little bit of a stretch), but it's a bit like them allowing compensated reordering of search results.

How's Bing these days?

shortformblog2• 13 years ago

This isn't a banner ad. This is essentially a branded search. It's not like Google is targeting users with Flash-based crud here. To call it a banner ad is kind of silly.

nodata• 13 years ago

Somebody works in marketing :)

freehunter4• 13 years ago

I actually have to agree somewhat, though (and I don't work in marketing). If you search for Southwest Airlines, why should Southwest Airlines not be the top result? Google has been showing pictures and information about people, products, and companies for quite a while now (https://www.google.com/#q=paul+graham), and shows commonly visited links off the main page of a website (as shown in that search for Paul Graham, they sub-link to his essays and other commonly visited pages).

It's very clear the intent of searching for Southwest Airlines; to get information about Southwest Airlines. The only difference between this result and any other result is that Southwest told Google what to put as their picture and sub-links, and Google made them pay for it. Searching for American Airlines shows almost exactly the same thing, except it's automatically populated by Google's engine, rather than being paid for.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

It is a part of the ad words section. It is paid for, even though they apparently so far are not charging extra for the image.

null_ptr• 13 years ago

What exactly would you call it then, if not a banner ad? It's a large, colorful, rectangular 5:1 panel that advertises a company. Cut the doublespeak.

golergka• 13 years ago

It's not an ad because it's an organic search result, which is directly relevant to what I'm searching. It's essentially the same as Google Image search result, only better suited for this particular page and request.

fooqux2• 13 years ago

If I search for MLK, I see his picture on the side. I don't see how getting a picture of Southwest Airlines when I search for "Southwest Airlines" is that big of a deal.

Now, if I were to search for "airlines" and saw that huge banner up there, I'd call that an ad and I'd be right there, handing out pitchforks. This? This is just returning searching results in a (arguably) prettier way.

gdilla• 13 years ago

How about just a banner. It reflects the content of the search. It would be an Ad if it was say, American Airlines pictured for a Southwest Airlines search. It's like seeing the official results being curated for the searcher.

whyenot• 13 years ago

It's an ad with a picture as a banner across a significant portion of the browser window. Ducks, quacking, etc.

chollida1• 13 years ago

This isn't a banner ad.

This is not a duck, its merely an animal that came from a female duck that happens to live in the water and share a nest with other ducks.

A banner ad, by definition, is a paid add that is an image. Google is showing banner ads for any definition of the word.

Dylan168073• 13 years ago

It walks like a duck but it doesn't quack like a duck. It shows up upon your specific input of the company name. I'm not sure what to call it, but 'advertisement' seems ill-fitting.

Now if it showed up when you typed a generic term like 'airline' I would agree it was an ad. But does it?

xux• 13 years ago

While it may not be a banner ad, it's a foot-in-the-door technique. Display these branded search for a few years, so when they're ready to implement real banner ads, users won't be shocked.

Just imagine the press release.

"This isn't something new we're doing. We've been experimenting with showing users highly targeted banner image when querying for specific terms. We're only expanding that target to help users find what they need faster."

Bam.

asdf001• 13 years ago

Interesting how this submission went from being #1 20 minutes ago, to #5 15 minutes ago and now is sitting at #9, despite the fact that the number of upvotes increased.

Google workers mass flagging this submission? Don't be evil.

freehunter4• 13 years ago

As was talked about with the recent controversy of Nokia and Microsoft news being penalized while Apple news was on the front page, HN has some pretty intrusive algorithms that play with the positioning of the article on the page, algorithms that aren't always clear to the users or necessarily productive to the discussion.

aviraldg• 13 years ago

These are 100% about the search query. Not related, but directly about the query. Not ads.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

Whether or not they are relevant to the search is immaterial to whether or not they are ads - lots of ads are relevant to the search terms. They are paid for with the intent of driving more traffic.

sker• 13 years ago

That promise was made when Schmidt was running things. We all know by now that Page is much more aggressive at monetizing existing products and killing off non-essential ones. We can expect more of these things in the future.

coryfklein• 13 years ago

Technically they haven't broken their promise yet - the ads are still in testing.

T-hawk3• 13 years ago

It's arguable that queries like [southwest airlines] are even a search. The vast majority of instances are probably URL-illiterate users merely trying to get to Southwest Airlines' web site. (And Google must know rather precisely just how many.) For these users, search is really operating as a natural-language alternative to DNS so such a clickable banner will help them get there.

More than just advertising, this represents an element of curation on such search terms, to get you to the place you're really looking for. It'll help avoid situations like when that one blog post appeared at the top for [facebook login] and suddenly bunches of users couldn't find Facebook.

Like any technological tool, it could be misused for evil, and so will require vigilance in the court of public opinion if not in actual courts.

(Disclaimer: I'm a potential Googler, currently in the interview pipeline, but these views are my own.)

peejaybee• 13 years ago

I would say that even URL-literate users use it this way, because the business-to-URL mapping is not always clear, and the naive guess is sometimes the worst possible one (e.g. Dick's Sporting Goods.)

graeme• 13 years ago

Yes, I thought this was (likely unintentionally) insulting. I rarely use urls unless it's a known site. Especially since I'm Canadian and the TLD isn't always predictable.

And on a phone, it's usually faster to google 'hacker news' or even 'hack new' if I'm lazy, than it is to type 'news.ycombinator.com'. (Yes, I'm horrible. And no, I don't want to bookmark it and make it too easy to come here....)

plorkyeran• 13 years ago

This is where I'm Feeling Lucky search is really useful. l <business name> sends me directly to the correct site very close to 100% of the time, even if I misspell the name of the company.

netcan2• 13 years ago

arguable, sure. I wouldn't call it an airtight argument, especially as it extends to more search terms.

In some cases, it's a 'natural-language alternative to DNS.' In some very similar cases, it's not. If Southwest Airlines crashes today, there will be a lot of people on that results page looking for news or pictures.

In some cases, it just isn't clear what the right page is.If you google the name of a local restaurant, you might find their site at #1 but in a lot of cases, a restaurant's site isn't the best place for info. Maybe their facebook page is. Maybe some aggregator site is. Google (supposedly neutrally) tells you what the best place for this is.

In this particular case, wikipedia is the right answer the the "Southwest Airlines" query a substantial portion of the time.

T-hawk3• 13 years ago

In some cases, it just isn't clear what the right page is.

Absolutely. Which is why Google isn't doing this across the board but for carefully selected cases. They'd do it for advertiser clients for whom Google's data demonstrates a vast preponderance of intent to just go to the company's web site by name. I'd bet quite a bit that [southwest airlines] queriers are looking for Southwest's own customer applications (pricing, booking, flight status) far more often than for Wikipedia or news articles. It's to Southwest's benefit if these users more smoothly find southwest.com and Google can pick up a slice of the benefit as the middleman.

Google (presumably) wouldn't do this for a local business with an ambiguous web presence. Nor for a company whose name more likely indicates searching for news items than for customer applications, perhaps [Goldman Sachs].

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

(And Google must know rather precisely just how many.)

In the article:

"a system with about 30 advertisers in the US in which it shows banner ads for companies including SouthWest Airlines on pages which include them in web search results"

So google knows by the fact that the name of the client is in the search term.

buffportion• 13 years ago

“Oh my god, Jerry, when you check your email you go to Altavista and type, ‘Please go to yahoo.com?’"

davidblueit• 13 years ago

what about if someone searches for nissan? picture of a car or a picture of the dudes computer repair service at nissan.com? whoever pays the most, which is sad. i'm sure the same thing will happen with apple

AJ0074• 13 years ago

Its been like this for many years; the bigger flag (to me) is that the massive picture pushes everything else below the fold and much off page 1.

tedunangst6• 13 years ago

Let's follow through on this thought. What searches will result in a banner ad for pets.com? "pets.com"? "pets"? "pet supplies"?

If pets.com is the second result for "pet supplies", are they allowed to buy the banner ad? Or do they have to wage an SEO campaign first to claim the top spot, then buy the ad?

Bonus question: Is Black Car Limo (URL blackcar.com) allowed to buy a banner ad for "black car"?

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

DNS is also a search, it's just handled by a standardized, multiparty system instead of a single for-profit corporation.

Google also runs actual DNS servers at 8.8.8.8. Would it be ok for them to inject ads there as well?

sanxiyn2• 13 years ago

OpenDNS actually does inject ads to its DNS servers (for NXDOMAIN). I wouldn't like it, but it would be ok.

AJ0074• 13 years ago

Chrome (v30.0.1599.101 for future reference) -> new tab -> Google + search bar appears above the recent/most popular sites list. I click on the search bar under the Google logo and start typing.. and magically my text does not appear in the text form but rather in the URL field in the navigation bar.

What once may have been uneducated behavior is a behavior Google is training users to do.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

You're right. Of course Google wants users to search for URLs instead of typing them, because it then gets to show them search results (which can be monetized) instead of just loading up a website.

In this case I can understand Southwest may think banner ads help with branding, but what I cannot understand is why so many companies buy the topmost Google text ad even though their websites are already #1 organically?

qeorge• 13 years ago

If Google would only show Southwest Airlines ads when I searched for [southwest airlines], I might agree. But they won't - they'll let Delta, Orbitz, or anyone else buy that spot (if Google's behavior with other flavors of AdWords is any guide).

Its an ad. No need to rationalize it away as actually being a good thing for the user. Its just a (huge) ad, which hopefully (for Google) won't damage the utility of their product enough to drive too many users away.

night815• 13 years ago

The full quote is still true.

"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever." -Marissa Mayer

That "banner" is not a "crazy, flashy, graphical doodad". That is pretty much the company's logo.

judk6• 13 years ago

Google ran a crazy flashy graphical doodad ad for nexus 7 on the Google home page.

tedunangst6• 13 years ago

The full quote would still be true even if it were a crazy, flashy, graphical doodad as long as it isn't flying around.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

They're separate clauses.

If I say "I won't hurt you. I won't sneak in in the night and smack you with a fish. Ever" and then I punch you in the face I've broken my promise. If I'd snuck in at night and hit you with a fish then I'd have broken two promises.

linux_devil• 13 years ago

How will they earn then? Most of their profits are from Ads.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

I love how people continue to attach emotional investment to an arbitrary thing like a corporation. Apologists, fanboys, and people with a child-like innocence. Do you really expect a for-profit company will stick to a promise like it means something?

The entire point behind a capitalist corporation is to make more profit, year after year. That is the entire idea behind the stock market. To think that they'd evade eventually exploring every avenue available to avoid making more money is mad.

mynewwork• 13 years ago

But there are plenty of companies that make a lot of money specifically because they 'stick to a promise'.

Whole Foods, Chipotle, REI, Patagonia all spring to mind as companies that I will happily pay a premium to shop at because of things they do that fall outside of the ruthless race to the bottom to cut costs. They make a profit off of me specifically because they stick to promises like "don't put antibiotics in chicken feed" or "don't use sweatshop labor".

I don't care about a banner ad the way I care about antibiotic use in agriculture, so this doesn't matter to me, but maybe someone out there does and will stop being a profitable google customer because of this action.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

Companies which have a niche market do depend on their customers continuing to invest in that niche market, but this is like any other company that sells a product. If people no longer want that product, they go out of business.

In the companies you cite, the product you're buying (primarily) is peace of mind. You feel better when you buy their products, vs others. If you stopped feeling good about it, you'd buy somewhere else, and they'd go out of business.

Here's another case of customer intent: CBS Fantasy Sports. For years they've been charging people to use their fantasy sports websites, while Yahoo, ESPN, and others gave theirs away for free. Year after year, people paid money for the CBS product, and they actually got more customers than the free providers. Why? Superior niche product. If the product wasn't as good as the free providers (and if they provided all the same features) people would have left in droves.

A "promise" is not a business model. A product is. Google's product is not banner-ad-free search, it's just search. If in the future there's an equally-good search product that uses no ads at all, Google will have an inferior product, and people will leave - eventually.

Brakenshire• 13 years ago

This is in turn naive, as if corporations operate within a mathematical model, not the real world. Corporations rely very heavily on the trust of their customers, whether those are consumers, or other businesses. Google's entire business model rests on the willingness of its consumers to hand over their data, the value of their word is fundamental to future profitability. Although admittedly this particular issue is not directly important in that sense.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

Google's business model rests on the advertisement and marketing industries. It does not work based on trust. It convinces people to use its product. The only "trust" it has is in its ability to do so.

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

No one is complaining about profit or exploring ideas. People are complaining about this specific idea.

Profits only show up if customers like the decisions that corporations make. NBC picks its shows to make maximum profit, just like CBS does. But CBS has made more popular decisions.

Complaining about a corporate decision doesn't mean people are naive. It means they just don't like that decision. That is a data point for Google to consider as they think about whether to roll this out broadly.

judk6• 13 years ago

This is basically the same as the new Product Search, where only paid ads are shows. (Google killed organic product search this year.)

But this version doesn't allow open pay-for-play access, only one preferred buyer is invited per search term.

angryasian• 13 years ago

the reality is , is that in general people like pleasant associated images. Its only mirroring the way that Facebook has a cover photo on profiles and made a difference in the way that profiles are viewed. Why not extract money when a corporation is searched for and show a profile for them. Similar to facebook and searching for a user. I think it will become an issues when corporation decide they want to use the image, like a banner ad vs a nice associated image.

bolder88• 13 years ago

Love how theguardian has a massive banner ad at the top of this article. God I hate the guardian.

ajiang• 13 years ago

Are we putting that much significance from a quote in 2005 by a Google executive who has since left Google?

While some see it as a social utility, Google is a $350B public company that generates its revenues from advertisements. 8 years ago, the world of advertising (and the world in general), was a different place. Holding Google accountable for something so far in the past by someone who is no longer there is a seemingly unfair standard.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Indeed - 8 years is a long long time. And who is actually harmed?

Would it be less evil if Google had to put banner ads up to make payroll?

tedunangst6• 13 years ago

Would it be less evil if Google had to put banner ads up to make payroll?

I think so. Google can't really pass this off as "the economic situation forces us to make a really difficult choice."

JohnTHaller• 13 years ago

If you take the full quote, this isn't an open and shut case as it certainly isn't a 'banner ad' in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005. The full quote is:

"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."

That Southwest Airlines screenshot doesn't look like a banner ad as described by Marissa Mayer. It doesn't seem to be flashing or flying around or popping up.

And, arguably, Google has been doing things that flash and fly around with the Google Doodles on the homepage for years. And no one freaked out about that.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005.

Everybody understood banner ads then in exactly the same as they understand them now. Ads in a banner. Banner ads never had to be "crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping," and you never needed a banner ad to do any of that.

Mayer isn't actually saying the two things are the same either, because she uses two different, complete sentences.

psbp3• 13 years ago

Isn't a banner ad an ad embedded in a page full of content? This is the actual content for a specific search, so I'm not sure how it constitutes a banner ad.

6thSigma• 13 years ago

This doesn't really meet my definition of a banner ad.

AbraKdabra• 13 years ago

This fits perfectly with the ad designer that Google released weeks ago.

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

It's great that Google is under so much scrutiny due to its do no evil slogan. But making such a fuss about Google changing its UI to make more money is somewhat a bit off the target in my opinion. Google changing UX to make more money is going to be tested and corrected by the market. The real serious threat to the society for Google being evil is the possibility of Google using the massive amount of information it collects to manipulate the society at an enormous scale. Just imagine the possibility of Google start trading. It could be all based on the public information Google gathered but Google's ability to collect it is no match by any other entities (alright, maybe NSA)

lnanek2• 13 years ago

The advertisement rows in GMail are really annoying too. I wish they would at least put an x button on the side so I can close them and do email in peace for a while.

samspenc• 13 years ago

Marissa Mayer isn't with Google anymore, is she?

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This is not wholly unexpected, after all their earnings have shown that CPC is down and while you can make that up in volume for a while, eventually you exhaust that path too.

And that then is what I think the real "problem" is. You reach a point where your biggest money maker, search advertising, by at least one and possibly two decimal orders of magnitude, is no longer growing. And all of the things you've ever done which were never as successful as search advertising are supposed to give you the growth that your stockholders are looking for. Interesting place to be for a company like Google I expect.

This is just another example of how that it process is coming along. It will be interesting to see what happens if it starts damaging their brand.

cylinder• 13 years ago

Right. Soon they will run out of surface area. And then they will squeeze out more money by cutting costs. Such is the life cycle of the corporation. They aren't able to monetize their other novelty projects yet, they are almost wholly reliant on advertising. I'm surprised their stock is priced as a growth company.

cmtruong• 13 years ago

I don't really care as long as the ads are relevant and interesting. We all know what we signed-up for (I hope) when we joined Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc...for "free."

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

We signed up for what they promised us?

teaneedz• 13 years ago

Most of what Google does (beta or released) these days is sending me to other options.

Thank you DuckDuckGo for taking a stand for users.

edwintorok• 13 years ago

You can also use ixquick.com or startpage.com that doesn't show banner ads for me.

anonmyous• 13 years ago

Google (and possibly many human's) principle over time..

Don't be Evil (2005) >>

Don't be Evil over short period of time (2013) >>

Oh screw it, now we are Evil enough. Let us plunder the hell (2021).

Now they will show ads for the key word, South West Airlines. Next it will be a whole flashy ad when you search flight, then it will when you start to think about flying or your girlfriend sends an email about flying for someone's funeral. But these profits too will dwindle after a point. Then they will start selling your profiles, what you read, what you think.

For a corporation privacy and trust, or any other values are only as important as the profit it can bring. Its only a matter of time before you will erode your own values, when profits are what we are maximizing. This is all the more likely when you are ambitious.

And then you repent it, and the cycle is complete.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

What a sensationalist headline. The guardian really seems to have learned the need to go sensationalist from the Snowden affair.

"Google breaks promise" followed by "Google is testing banner ads" in the first paragraph. So umm, "breaks" is the wrong verb, more like "thinking of breaking"

The reality is, Google runs hundreds, perhaps thousands of experiments all the time and only a few make it.

jasonlingx• 13 years ago

Shouldn't the title be "Marissa Mayer breaks 2005 promise..."?

jggonz2• 13 years ago

I used to dislike ads in general, until Google came along and made ads actually useful. There have been many times when I needed to search for reliable vendors in my area, and being able to perform a query for a product and receive an ad for a vendor that sells said product proved to be very useful and a huge time-saver. I no longer had to dig through search results, the ads were my search results. Same thing goes for the great set of Youtube video ads that have been improving lately: some of them actually are useful. Gmail ads are also very interesting. They sometimes inform me of new technologies, or other things that are related to what I'm reading in my inbox: that can be valuable. I really hope the trend continues with these banner ads. Being able to add a touch of graphic to an otherwise dull search result page can be useful if done right, and Google does seem to care about their ad business. Anyway, those are just my personal thoughts on the subject.

magicalist• 13 years ago

I guess they are relatively "classy", as other people have pointed out, but I still don't want them in my search results. Regardless, it's just a test, so discouraging them from moving forward with it is good, but "breaks 2005 promise" is dumb because they haven't actually done it. "Poised to break 2005 promise"? Still overly dramatic, but less wrong.

Also, I first saw this over on search engine land yesterday[1]. It's possible the Guardian author remembered that Marissa Mayer quote (and blog post) on their own, but it seems unlikely. It's pretty shitty to take a story and not even cite where you got the idea.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-top-banner-ads-17...

canthonytucci3• 13 years ago

I just tried it.

I count:

1 Big ass ad 3 "News" items 5 genuine "Search Results" (with no heading or any way to know when the ads and nonsense stops. One of the 5 is a link to the Southwest Airlines Android App 3 "In-Depth Articles" I don't know what this is, i guess long blog posts?

This honestly looks more to me like a domain squatting BS ad page that we hate on ISPs for than a research tool (which is what I used to think of google search as).

Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results

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