Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

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That article claims that Google regularly returns result pages full of ads, and shows a screenshot of a search for [what is bitcoin] as evidence: http://i.imgur.com/eBtzYic.png

Obviously a non-commercial query like this should return few (if any) ads, so I tried to reproduce the author's results. Here is a screenshot taken of searching for [what is bitcoin] in a fresh Incognito window: http://i.imgur.com/KfY3gvs.png . There are no ads, and the search results a reasonable.

I thought the vastly different result could maybe be a result of searching on google.com vs google.co.uk, but changing the domain did not generate any ads either: http://i.imgur.com/5gcOvtJ.png

Does anyone on HN see a page full of ads when they search for [what is bitcoin]?

  > Does anyone on HN see ads when they search for [what is bitcoin]?

Yes: http://i.imgur.com/2iFv7Yf.png

When is this from? I thought the black bar was all but gone.

Did you make sure to disable Adblock and extensions like Ghostery?

I used the stock crunchbang browser (iceweasel) and it showed me advertisements: http://i.imgur.com/mhJhc5W.png

That screenshot was taken in a Chrome profile with no extensions. I also checked in Firefox with no extensions, with the same result.

Not a full page, but above the search results there is a block of 2-3 ads just as in the http://i.imgur.com/eBtzYic.png example.

Yes, I got the plus500 ad on that search.

Maybe because in incognito mode you are not tracked, so you can not have contextual ads. Apparently, the service do not try to serve non-contextual-ads at all.

FWIW, for getting ads, your location and TLD matters. Perhaps, you can check Adwords ad check tool--available when you place ad for any keywords.

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