14 DAY TRIAL // Google is starting to come around to its old self after the emotional week following the Microsoft bid to take over Yahoo! It stirred some waves when it offered to lend a helping hand and then it sat back and watched how things unraveled. Back to the drawing board of moneymaking schemes now, and a New York Times bit of news previews what they've been working on.
Apparently, the Mountain View-based company will be introducing, gradually, video ads in the search results page. Right now, Google shows a thumbnail, the duration and the rating next to the videos, plus the option to play the video inline. Google's Marissa Mayer said that "The big insight of Google wasn't text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format. We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don't work in that format. With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page. The ads on the top part of the page should match."
The ads will still be mostly textual, but some will have the option to play a short video. The danger many people saw at first, when this was announced as ready to roll out soon was that the ads caught the user's eye and distracted him from what he was doing. Daniel Dulitz set things straight in a Slashdot thread: "You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period. Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them."
From an outsider's point of view, Google's finally caught up with advertising, but is trying hard not to let it show, because of the inappropriate sole means it could do it in: next to their moneymaking search. It's difficult to keep a balance between the two, as one must be up front, while the other is mostly hidden. Then again, the one in the shade is the one they're interested in.