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.