This could be a great move. Google has moved focus on its search to advertising.
When searching "Hotels in San Francisco", the first organic search term is below the fold for me, which is a 180 from where Google was even 3 years ago.
When searching "Hotels in San Francisco", the first organic search term is below the fold for me, which is a 180 from where Google was even 3 years ago.
The same thing shows up for "Restaurants in X," "Museums in X," and the like.
I decided to play with it a bit, and selected the filter "4 stars or better", and it came up with an empty set.
I thought well, that's weird. Surely there are 4 star hotels in San Francisco!
So I kept trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It turns out the little ribbon is actually showing you results from the map that's down and to the right.
That's kind of cool, but there's no UI cues indicating that connection at all. Strange to see something so clumsy on a Google search page.
Just curious what kind of results you are expecting.