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].

- 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.

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.

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 hope they change their name to something that people can take seriously.