Loading ...You know what’s better than letting an unpopular and easily spammable feature die a quiet death? Letting it affect your ad revenue!
SearchWiki, for those who haven’t heard, is an add-on to Google results when a user is signed on that will allow searchers to move a given result for a given result up, down or out of the rankings, as well as leave comments that all SearchWiki users will see. This only affects the individual users, though there have been hints that massive dings up or down might be taken into account with all results. Still, usage isn’t that high and the #1 question or comment Google is receiving about it is ‘how the hell do I turn it off?’ (the answer: Sign out, jump through some hoops in Firefox or just bend over and take it) – and of course this has spamming written all over it: Just ding up all your results, ding down your competitors’ results – what’s the worst that can happen?
Google has been caught testing the delete option for SearchWiki on its paid ads. This will effectively remove the offending (read: competitive) ad on the user’s results for that given search.
On one hand, it’s a great additional piece for the ad’s quality score: If it gets wiped out, it gets dinged on all the other ads. On the other, it’s even more ripe for gaming than the natural side, as there’s no positive interaction: One click and the ad’s toast – as is (potentially) the advertiser’s quality score.
Ultimately, I don’t see this working out for one big reason: Revenue. Giving users the ability to wipe out ads on the page isn’t going to be seen as a quality-of-ads thing, I’m sure more often than not you’re going to see people using it to get rid of all ads on a given page for a cleaner browsing experience. Fewer ads means less revenue, less revenue means no replacement volleyballs for the Google campus – and a few more fired engineers.
Whether it’s the ’search this site’ bars on some top sites or making expanded broad match even more expanded, Google has always trended towards doing more to show more ads. Five bucks says that this will prove to be a revenue-depressing element and it’s gone at the end of its test period. Anyone want in?
I'm kind of a cross between Led Zepplin and these guys:
- Yahoo and MSN merge search – it’s official
- Media Co’s Want More Favorable Google Algorithm
- Wolfram Alpha = Wikipedia killer?
Tags: Google · Google sucks · PPC news · Search News Share on Twitter
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