A fine line between monetisation and usability
The appearance of Google’s new preview feature got me thinking this week about the huge changes to the way search engines results are presented we have seen over the last couple of years. Watching Google SERPs morph from pages of plain text links into multimedia pages featuring amongst other things; videos, images, site search, product feeds, maps and local results, social media updates.
Whilst web 2.0 was a much derided concept; in many ways the Google SERPs are a microcosm of the changes that web 2.0 technology has brought to the Internet. We now consume massive amounts of video and image content, much of it freely shared across social networking sites and much of this content is now searchable. Locality is increasingly important to us and we increasingly want to know what our friends think of something instantly (see the Bing/Facebook tie up).
Google has done an incredible job of integrating results from all of these ‘new’ formats into its results through Universal Search. It will however, be very interesting to see what impact the rolling out of multiple universal search features including advertising formats, site links, product extensions and the imminent arrival of video extensions (http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/videoextensions.html) – will have on a users perception of Google’s results. In addition, Google’s testing of new Adwords top ads format and extensions have also been the cause of numerous discussions.
http://searchengineland.com/google-lets-searchers-show-11-search-ads-on-top-54965
Will users start to be confused by the array of ad formats and natural search results? Will users start to question Google’s perceived impartiality? Or will Google’s vision of only persisting with results that users like clicking on (the real secret of their success) win out?
This is definitely some interesting food for thought for the teams at Facebook responsible for monetising the vast quantity of users and traffic available to advertisers. How will they take a bigger share of ad revenues without compromising the user experience on the world’s most popular social network? Watch this space!
