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.)
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.)
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....)
Good point, yes there are reasons other than URL illiteracy (convenience) to use search as a DNS replacement. So this new behavior of Google helps even you. And without any deceptive downside since if you are URL-literate you're probably pretty well aware of what's advertising and what isn't.
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.
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.
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?
I've heard apocryphal stories of companies seeing reduced clickthrough on search results when they've tried canceling ads for which they are the top (or only) search result, especially for extremely niche products. The claimed interpretation was that some customers were interpreting the ad as an indicator of legitimacy.
The last thing one of these companies would want is a competitor or some kind of unsavory hanger-on diluting their brand with a different message or viagra ads.
If a competitors ad ever showed above a perfectly relevant organic result, THAT would be pitchfork time. Until then, if advertisers want to throw money at Google at as a show of "legitimacy" for brand development, bully for Google.
> but what I cannot understand is why so many companies buy the topmost Google text ad even though their websites are already #1 organically?
Google's organic search takes lots of things into account, some of them personalization; a company that is usually #1 organically won't always be, and buying an ad makes it more likely that people will see your page first.
Citation need. Google is on fact doing the opposite. If a chrome user types a URL into the omnibox, they do NOT get a search. Whereas typing a URL into a form field IS a search.
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.
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.
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.
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].
Google is trialing it for a few carefully selected cases. But even in those cases:
- It's not a 100% bet that searchers are looking for the company website. Some will still want stock prices or wikipedia or travel sites or whatnot. For these cases this is a banner funeling more traffic to the company website with a forceful "more pixels" approach.
- If the company starts to hit the media for something (especially something bad), this helps them do it.
Anyway, I think this 'alternative to DNS' argument is kind of circular. If everyone is looking for the companies' homepage Google's paid & organic "sitelinks" (triggered by exactly these cases) take up most of the screen real estate. The company website already gets most of the traffic. Some people still want a wikipedia link or whatnot. These banners are designed too suck up a few more of the undecided and presumably perform some branding function (especially if only a few big companies are allowed to have these).
BTW, I think it's google's right to sell banners. It's their damn website. There's the same conflict/impartiality issue interest when any info/media business is selling ad space. But I also think this is part of an evolving ethos. The initial ethos was small text ads instead of big flashy screen real estate. Those ads needed to get clicks with an attractive message. They were available to small business just as they were available to meg-corps, pay for what you eat style. These banners are screen real estate auctions available exclusively to big boys. Adwords shooed away the 'internet entrepreneur' types. Over the years natural search has (as part of anti spam campaigns) been burying smaller businesses. Adwords focuses much less on SMEs these days too.
As I said, I'm not calling foul. Their website. Advertising is legal. I'm just calling duck.
One hypothesis: someone who is looking for stock prices would search Google Finance or search for "LUV"; someone who is looking for ticket prices will search "YYZ to SFO", and someone who is looking for wikipedia will search "southwest airlines site:en.wikipedia.org".
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.
Look at some point it becomes the user's responsibility to type an extra 5 or 10 characters to disambiguate their intent if they are looking for "news" or "criticism".
Google gets flack for not being an omniscient omnipotent benevolent God, when they are being darn good.
I can't provide a detailed opinion of this case because I can't recreate what the Guardian screenshot shows, but the end result in this particular case is Southwest airline's cost of traffic is vastly inflated.
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..
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"?
> (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.
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
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.)