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

When this particular user searches "Southwest Airlines", the giant image pushes all of the other results below the fold. The likelihood of the user clicking on an organic listing is very small to zero.

While most major US corporations have been purchasing PPC ads for their own trademarks for many years, and sitelinks have existed in Adwords ads for a few ads allowing more navigation options, this particular screenshot shows much deeper results. What I see in that screenshot matches the organic listings for Southwest Airlines right now on Google, "Check in Online" etc. The "sponsored" label within this element makes me assume that Southwest is paying any of those clicks.

The marketing departments of these large corporations, being dependent on their own internal results to justify further budget increases and bonuses are easily pulled in to this traffic attribution trap. They will be able to say, bookings from Adwords PPC traffic increased X times, when these were bookings that they previously were getting for free.

Figure out may be its not a great idea in two years? Too late. Google will just show something else in your place. (Google's ITA software prohibition expires in 2016, which will effect a lot of travel sites and airlines but that is a different topic.)

Is Google within their rights to do this, in the US? More or less yes. However, these corporations are baking in billions of dollars in extra costs to themselves. If I buy a Facebook ad or a Superbowl ad I get new visibility. Should I have to pay Rand Mcnally for users who walk through the door of my Starbuck's franchise because they used the map to find my location? It doesn't sound so ludicrous if I used a smart phone app to find a local coffee shop.

There is another side to this, the user's side. How happy are users once they know that most of what they are clicking on with Google are paid advertisements? For most of Google's life ads were just supplemental, a little additional content that made the company boatloads of money. No, for certain terms all Google is is ads. Its wildly more profitable. When users have been trained for years to believe Google is offering them objectively ranked content it becomes even better because their brains believe that ad they just clicked on is actually an objectively chosen "best" answer. Is this sustainable in the long run?

I'm not 30 yet and I feel like an old fart. I don't like the NSA reading my email. I don't like Facebook logins following me around the web. I don't appreciate perpetual history of every thing I do. I never even created a LinkedIn account. I don't like the idea of my Google experience being a boatload of paid ads. And I have my own company with well over a million monthly US users..

I hope DuckDuckGo does really well.

I suspect that's exactly what this experiment seeks to test. Is this giant banner result more relevant for users searching "southwest airlines" than the knowledge graph box that contains Wikipedia, Stock Prices, and a Flight Status prompt?

If so, then we'll start to see these "banner ads" become more common. If not, they delete some code and everything goes back to the way it was.

Rather than theory-crafting, Google is measuring their users' behaviour. As I feel they should be.

Google gets flack for not being an omniscient omnipotent benevolent God, when they are being darn good.

A contract must be quid pro quo to be valid.

"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend" is a promise, but it isn't a legal contract.

"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend for $100" is a promise, and because there is a quid pro quo exchange it can qualify as an enforceable contract. Bob can potentially come after you for damages if you renege on your end of it.

One-sided promises (like the one Google made) are generally not considered contractually obligated[1].

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/consideration-every-c...

2. Official pages already have the ability to skip the queue, for free.

In most ad-based marketing, you're typically not just randomly throwing your brand out there. Obviously, the expected ROI goes up when you can target the right demographic (saturday morning cartoons versus world news with Tom Brokaw). This is not that. This isn't a demographic-driven ad, based on search criteria like "airline travel" or "buy tickets from DEN to DTW". The person knew exactly what they were searching for. Hell, depending on your browser, typing that exact string in your address bar will take you directly to Southwest Airlines. Google just managed to convince companies to pay them for this, while at the same time presenting a prettier and more useful direct links within that box.

As an afterthought, the most-searched for term in our company web portal is "google". I would be extremely surprised if Google, themselves, don't have a ton of searches where they could simply append a ".com" to the search query and send them directly to where they wanted. I doubt my parents would even notice.

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.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

http://i.imgur.com/IhQLUoD.png

Edit: Judging by your edit, you seem to be confusing "what should they show" with the original question, which is something like "Why is the right 50% plus the top block of the left column ads?"

The answer to your question is "whatever links match the search terms based on their wonderful, wonderful indexing algorithm."