Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single “Sponsored results” label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We’re also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you’ll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping.
↫ Omkar Muralidharan on Google’s Ads and Commerce Blog
I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they’d gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them – which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all “AI” summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent “AI” KPIs on employees, that’s not going to happen, either.
Regardless, it’s still an improvement to Google’s results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn’t make it substantially worse, so I’ll take what I can get.
This is actually far worse!
This is based on my own experience, so take it for what it is, but when looking at search results, I am trained to ignore all the noise around the results, like overviews, AI slop, data cards, etc., and this certainly includes headers like the one they are adding.
I only focus on the actual link cards, but I’m hyper-sensitive to those cards having “Ad” or “Sponsored” label no matter how small or gray they try to make it.
This change makes it impossible to identify ads by looking at them. Instead, I will now need to look back and identify the larger context in which the link is presented. This increases the odds that I will click on an ad by accident. Fuck you Google.
I’m not sure this is great, but it is a positive move. At least there is a Hide sponsored results button. But of course it is at the bottom, after seeing all the sponsored results.
Again, I see no problem Google having financial means to continue existing and serving great results. However Search has beens suffering for a long while.
They sacrificed “long tail” queries for general ones for years now. If I have a very specific thing I want to search, it “auto corrects” me to the popular thing. “No, I am not interested in the recent thing I am actually looking up the early 2000 specific thing”
I’m sure this way they get better results in the “topline metrics”. More people are happy that their sloppy queries are corrected. However that leaves power users out.
And ads? Yes, having to scroll three pages of sponsored and similar results on mobile before seeing anything “organic” is a big issue.
Anyway, it is good to see they at least try to make progress. But they should also fix the Search itself in addition to the window dressing.