14 DAY TRIAL // "Ho-ho-ho, my money-making links, let me just try to dress you up in the holiday spirit, perhaps people might notice you better!" papa Google looked upon the Sponsored Links with candles light reflecting from its eyes. "I like you so very much, you're everything that keeps me going", he continued.
Like it has been doing for three years now, Google is dressing up the divider bar between the free listings and the sponsored ones with something special for specific holiday searches, as reported by Barry Schwartz of searchengineland.com. I say that because I myself cannot check this out, all I get is the traditional not-holiday-type-of-meaning-of-the-word bar that gets boring at some point. That's because it is mostly available to those living in the United States. "If you live outside the U.S. and want to see the dividers, after you do a search, add &gl=us to the end of the search string in your address bar."
The specific keywords searched for that are said to return the respective separator are "Christmas", that turns the bar into a row of Christmas Trees, "Kwanzaa", turning it into green, black and red candles and "Hanukkah gifts" that bring you white candles. I don't know why (actually I do, but it has nothing to do with the holiday spirit, but more with drawing attention to the ads), but searches for popular toys such as "Playstation" or "used Motorman robots" return a divider made up from Christmas baubles.
Well, perhaps I would do the same, if I were to own such a platform that outperforms anything that even thinks of competing with it. And I'm sure that it's not greed they have on their mind when they do this. It's just the Holiday Spirit. And if this happens to bring some extra cash on the side, so be it, who are they to appose it?