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Sep. 7, 2007

Yesterday ,two managers at Google's group business products, Sundar Pichai and Nicholas Fox addressed the possibility of bundling image or video ads into Google's Universal Search.

The discussion took place Sep. 6 at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York. Fox says integrating video or image ads into sponsored search results is an option that has come up in internal discussions at Google, since search ads are there to give users information that is most relevant to their query.

Fox said "in many cases that's a text ad. In other cases, it may be an image, a video or something else. However, the risk isn't showing something garish or flashy, because users would become blind to the ads and it would hurt the business long-term."

Fox gave the example of a local butcher: A video with shots of fresh meat and the overall store experience would be more enticing than a 10-word text ad. More value is provided to both the consumer and advertiser.

Right now, there is more thinking than action around the issue at Google, and for potential experiments, the search company will proceed "cautiously and slowly," Fox reassured the audience.

"On average, the images and video ads that you see today on content networks aren't what will work today! They won't carry over very well. Any steps Google makes will have to be "incremental and evolutionary," said Pichai.

He added "we've started triggering Universal Search on certain queries, but not for all. But we do have a good base to measure user experience and satisfaction."

While Google doesn't break down or disclose details in terms of percentage of click-throughs or actual number queries, the feature has been "well received in deed."

In terms of the overall Universal Search experience, Pichai acknowledges that Google has ways to go before every search yields blended results for its many users.

When asked why Universal Search wasn't rolled out much sooner, given Google's tech-intensive culture, Pichai says that solving the three challenges of managing the infrastructure, determining relevance ranking and keeping the user experience clean and unchanged took a couple of years.

Pichai added "on average, people don't see the differences on the surface, because our goal is to keep the user experience easy. However, Universal Search is still in a very nascent stage."

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Source: Online Media Daily