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I noticed the same flaw, but lets cut to the chase. I sell a flowcharting tool. According to Google Analytics, ~40% of my visitors are running displays with a screen height of 800 pixels or below.

Adjusting my browser window size accordingly, I search for "flowchart software". Only 2 organic results are above the fold, whereas there are 7 ads above the fold. 2/9 = 22%, so the OP really wasn't that far off the mark for many users.

And yet if I were in the market for a [paid] flow charting package I would immediately look at the ads first, as in my opinion those ones would be the highest quality packages. I might also trust the first few organic links, but why bother when there are so many professional competitors vying for my business with the ads?

The ads are just another form of search.

Funny, I would do the exact opposite - completely ignore the ads and look for experiences of the users, reviews or really anything but the ads. How does buying adwords correlate with quality?

It's mostly subjective and entirely contextual:

If the software company is large enough to afford a marketing team to fill Google up with ads then there's a good chance the software will also have big dollars spent on it.

Contrariwise, if the software you're looking for is already large and complex (driven by the nature of what it needs to do), then ads will mean nothing because they will be expected.

While on the other end of the scale with small purpose-built apps you will deliberately ignore ads since you won't want any bulky bloatware that can afford adspace.

The ads are just another cost to the business, so that flows on through to the buyer, either through:

- higher prices

- worse customer service

- fewer features

- the company eventually going under as they get priced out of the ecosystem

You won't find many subjective comparisons & reviews of players in the ads (it will all be companies selling themselves) and you probably won't typically find any free or open source software either.

Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are looking at.

In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use.

I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.

You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?

But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search experience better for power users.

Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/... which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models.

Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.

Percentage aside, I think it is perfectly reasonable that Google reserves a lot of space for ads. What pays for the search results after all? I am surprised that people expect to get great service for free. It's just not sustainable.

What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result. If Google is confident about an Ad being information then why not let people click it for its relevance? Why make the background just barely different from the search result so that its almost impossible to visually separate ads from results? Let people clearly know that its an ad and let them decide whether they want to click on it or not.

Bing is as deceptive as Google here so not singling you guys out but please don't portray a reasonable effort to make money as a something larger than that.

>What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result.

I'm not sure if this is true as I almost never click on an actual add link rather then a search link. I'm not sure if this is subconscious (I'm simply not seeing the adds), but I think if it was deceptive I'd be clicking them all the time.

Those of us who are in marketing, publishing, & start ups are not generally an accurate reflection of the general market. We tend to be far more aware of advertising than a typical web user.

Most searchers are unable to distinguish the difference between search ads and content. From a number of surveys we did here http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results

"Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!"

"So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page."

No doubt, especially since you work for Google. When ads are similar looking to content why even bother to do a much better job to find content when ads can fill that void? Better content equals less clicks on ads.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. 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, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "

Better content equals less clicks on competitors' search service. Something that your pamphlet misses entirely.

Over the long run, maybe and that's if people notice it and if Google isn't able to buy traffic like it does with Firefox. Google loves to test things and they can find the sweet spot on the most profitable SERPs and niches.

The problem for Google is that soon enough people will notice what Panda and Penguin did.

> I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful.

Look at the results of that query right there. I'd say the ads are at least as good as the results.

I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.

I can't believe you're being honest here. Counting just the last couple days, terms I've seen useful ads are: "trek stores near <where I live>", "glue for wood", "coach usa" and "shuttle lga". Also for the vast majority of terms in my search history, which happen to be arcane technical questions, I don't see any ads at all.

The title is perhaps a bit misleading, but the article itself speaks of results instead of search/non-search. His claim is technically true.

To be fair, he should have also calculated the space the ads take up. However, one can tell by eye (from those screenshots at least) that that space has increased.

The conclusion he draws (neglecting ease of use) doesn't logically follow from the data, though.

Matt - I will stay clear of the percentage of real estate from the screen and other issues, however I think many people and businesses that advertise with Google (mine is one) feel the page does not do enough to differentiate the paid ads with the organic results. This is especially true with the ads at the top. I would ask that Google seriously look at changing this practice and if memory serves me right it use to be this way. Some people in this thread have said the same thing and I am fairly positive that most users and advertisers would agree. Thank you for your consideration.

Hi Matt,

But what about Google testing 7 and 4 results per SERP page?

I mean no offence but if you guys are showing less organic results there is nothing Google could say to convince me that they not promoting ads more than organic results?

I agree ADS are just as relevant if not more than organic results and in most cases better than organic results as people spending money on the ads, normally spend a lot of money and time in their products and or services as well as landing page to ensure the UX is great and that it will lead to a sale.

But not everyone has money?

> We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases.

As someone who works managing PPC adverts I have been referred to as "Google meat based matching algorithm"

this 1-3 columns not containing organic search results (main product of google, it why peoples using google).

A. Ads can be helpful, even on MFA site (and clicked very good if organic results not providing any answers). This technique was tested by lot of webmasters before. Also it just matter of thinking (ads is really helpful) and earnings reports.

Peoples visit google to search the web, but not to search adwords websites. But google give maximum priority for ads, not for their main product - organic search results. It will lead to decreased importance of google as search engine very soon. That articles you mention here - search google or bing and you will find lot of different opinions.

B: that searches where no adwords is not commercial. 99% of peoples creating websites & content because it their workjob, what mean webmasters also need to make money. If it not happens - it will mean less importance of google for webmasters and for searchers in nearest future. Just check how google alexa traffic rank fluctuating after black & white animals (time when google places ads above fold in search results).

C: So maximum daily budget/ppc is not important anymore? 8-P

Do Google employees also see the same interface with ads? And if so, shouldn't it be illegal as the employees (in)directly increase Google's revenue?

I'd hazard a guess that they whitelist any clicks from within Google networks so that nobody gets charged for them. That's fairly standard practice.

This is a comparison made back in 2005 and Google has a better UI than the rest

http://startupboy.com/2005/12/20/fix-the-search-interface-fi...

Do you have any stats on what percentage of people click on all those options on the left? One option may be to divide the page into two columns one for paid search results and the other for organic search results.

In some cases Google has reduced the organic search results to 7 listings per page. On some of the search results where Google has done that they have also added 3 AdWords ads at the top & the bottom of the organic search results.

The reason the prefer ads in the left column to the right is that is where most the attention goes & most of the clicks go. Ads at the top of the left column of the search results might get a 20% to 30% clickthrough rate (higher than that even on navigational search results...more like 90%+). And ads in the right column are lucky to get even a 1% CTR.

Number aside...18% or 21.47% the trend is obvious to everyone.

(I know you don't believe what you wrote but you had to say it anyway. Google's attitude changed in 2004 when you added ads on top, so attitude shifts to justify whatever you do. See Google's attitude on the original Pagerank paper)

Ads are as helpful as content? First there's a major conflict of interest since you control both ads and content. One update and content shifts, making ads by default better or worst. A tiny shifts not noticed by 99% of people can increase your profits by a wide margin. A tiny shift here and a Panda shift there and your revenue reaches $50 Billion a year, or a huge cut of the total e-comm trade.

If I search for Adidas 2012 VX Shoe (made it up) and I see 3-4 ads on top, why are they more helpful? Because they have it, because they have most reviews, cheapest price or what? In every case I have tried advertising it's the ad price difference, especially among top merchants. Of course that ad price is added to the consumer one way or another so nice try, portraying this as a helpful thing. Equally as important, the sites that lost traffic due to more ads are forced to go out of business or advertise /increase bids. A vicious cycle, induced by Google, to benefit Google.

>> And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads.

There is no money in many searches, that's known, nothing altruistic about it. You show ads where you have ads and where it is profitable, in key markets.

>> Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.

The difference between Geico, Progressive, All State et al is just the ad price and CTR, in sum how much money you make from them. The best site for the user would be a comparison site or maybe a CNN Fortune article that compared them.

The real questions: Should Google be trusted to rank organic search in an unbiased manner when they have a huge incentive to manipulate them, quarter by quarter? The only sure thing, unless Google is lying to SEC, is that Google's profits are increasing by an extraordinary amount after all these changes were made.

Is it good for the economy and for the web to have one company that controls both ranking and ads? Google control as much as 95% in some EU countries and roughly 70% in USA. You are talking about monopoly territory.

>>The difference between Geico, Progressive, All State et al is just the ad price and CTR, in sum how much money you make from them. The best site for the user would be a comparison site or maybe a CNN Fortune article that compared them.<<

Absolutely. And it is worth noting that recent Progressive case, where they defended a person who killed a Progressive auto insurance client (to try to skip out on paying the settlement to their customer's family).

Having a diversity of the same types of companies (basically what often amounts to white label brands with the same exact business model) isn't the same thing as offering various entry points into various stages of the funnel & different editorial opinions.

Also the brand bias in the organic results often makes them parallel the ads once more. And that awareness is often driven by advertising. The day after the Progressive fiasco I remember going to YouTube and seeing a huge Progressive ad. ;)