The more observant or caffeinated of you will have already noticed that the ads displayed alongside Google’s search results have moved closer to their natural counterparts.
On a lower resolution system you might not have noticed, but whereas the ads used to be on the far right side of my 1680 x 1050 screen, they are now nestled quite cosily with the regular search results.
So why the change?
Well there’s no doubt that people’s monitors are bigger than they used to be, so Google may have decided that you can have too much of a good thing; in this case white space.
And it’s certainly a lot more difficult to ignore the ads in their new position.
Alternatively, is it possible that Google are taking ideas from Bing?
In an earlier post I commented on the remarkable similarity between Bing’s layout and that of Google, but it now appears that Google may be learning a trick or two from their new rival.
It’ll be interesting to see how this impacts ad performance. Will the new layout produce more clicks? Will quality go down? Watch this space.
