Last May Google announced that it would begin experimenting with display ads on its popular Image Search, which it has largely been unable to monetize – in 2006 the company estimated
that it was missing out on $200 million a year because it wasn’t including ads in search results, and that number has almost certainly gone up since then. Google has previously tried to incorporate text ads into results, but abandoned the practice after seeing a marked decline in traffic.
We haven’t heard anything from Google about the ads since then, but we’ve just gotten a screenshot of one of them in the wild. As promised, the ad is distinguished by a subtle yellow background and a “sponsored link” header. Unfortunately, it seems like these new ads may only be taking text matches into account, without using any image recognition – the ad below is for a Guinness barstool that happens to be named “Buffalo”, but is clearly unrelated to the other images that dominate the results.
It’s impossible to judge the new algorithms based on a single example, but I hope this isn’t representative of what we’ll be seeing when the ads launch to the public. It’s not uncommon to see Google AdSense ads that are irrelevant to text searches, but these aren’t intrusive and generally don’t detract from search results. With images, a botched match is far more jarring – bad results on Image Search would probably turn off far more users than the abandoned text ads ever did.
Thanks to former TechCrunch contributor Steve Poland for the tip.
This post was originally posted by our content partner Techcrunch and is being republished on shoemoney.com with permission.
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November 16, 2008 at 11:28 am
So happy that I found your site! Everytime I put Amazon in my search box [on my regular explorer page], it gets me to Amazon, then adds tons of letters to my search and it flips over to Google image search and cannot find what I’m looking for. Even though it just took me off the page that I wanted. This only seems to happen at sites where cookies are needed. I have done EVERYTHING suggested to enable cookies. I am on medium security as well. Why is google image search stuck on to my yahoo search bar? Help? Thank you in advance for understanding and helping.
November 16, 2008 at 11:27 am
I am stuck in google image search. everytime I enter any web needing cookies, it flips me off my destination and to google image search! I am using yahoo in my search bar, yet it still is stuck on google image search and won’t let me in anywhere! my cookies are enabled and i’m on medium privacy. it adds tons of letters to my search as soon as I’ve landed where I want to be…then it flips me to google image search!Frustrated and hating google at the moment. Any suggestions?
October 28, 2008 at 5:25 pm
very interesting.. i think once they work on it a little it will get better..
October 23, 2008 at 1:50 pm
exciting
October 9, 2008 at 3:53 am
I noticed this on the Marketing Pilgrim too. Why would anyone want to use image search advertising? I think it’s a waste of money because people just search for images and leave the website after they get the image they want. So there is no use of using image advertising. I have a website that receives a lot of pageviews just because of the images but the users just look at the images and leave. It’s a gadgets website.
October 7, 2008 at 11:01 pm
This looks interesting:
So Google plans to monetize the world’s information, eh?
October 7, 2008 at 2:33 am
Time to refresh those alt tags in images
October 9, 2008 at 3:55 am
Alt tags really help get you good rankings in not only image searches but also web searches. I’ve started making use of the alt tag and it’s really given me an increase in traffic. This is one thing that many people forget about. Put keywords in your image alt tag!
October 6, 2008 at 11:29 pm
WOW.. So it is a great feature for the advertisers which is adding more value to the adwords. By this, we will still able to target the vast audience which we were missing for years… Google always innovates.
October 6, 2008 at 11:50 am
That will be nice. For me no problem.
October 6, 2008 at 11:03 am
it’s a smart move
October 6, 2008 at 9:41 am
LET’S GO BUFFALO! Hopefully you’ll be able to target just the image search network. I don’t see how it would be otherwise.
October 6, 2008 at 8:31 am
This is a big let down. If this continues people will just switch to search engines that don’t hastle them this much.
October 6, 2008 at 4:27 am
adsense have image based ads which make the big nice…… however the entire concept in google images is something i found not useful
October 6, 2008 at 12:56 am
They’re trying to catch up… desperately.
October 6, 2008 at 12:49 am
Google is everywhere now, where is other search engines?
October 5, 2008 at 7:09 pm
very interesting.. i think once they work on it a little it will get better..
October 9, 2008 at 3:56 am
It’s still in beta so there are still a lot of things that need to be worked out.
October 5, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Google trying to find more ways to make money. Love it.
October 6, 2008 at 6:11 am
All people are trying to do so. -))
October 5, 2008 at 8:32 am
Google is announcing half-baked products and plans.. They should not do it anymore.
October 5, 2008 at 6:05 am
It sounds great and interesting
October 5, 2008 at 5:21 am
oh, i forgot to mention… if Google is planning to do this, then i bet the first thing they did was figure out a way to stop bad results showing =]
October 5, 2008 at 5:16 am
hrmm… *sighs*
i dont think i like it!
Thanks for letting us know.
October 5, 2008 at 4:57 am
More money for googl!
October 7, 2008 at 7:22 am
I think Google really get a lot from this service.
October 5, 2008 at 3:45 am
I don’t see how that will work. When people search the main google engine they are looking for products and services to purchase a lot of the time… when I search for images… um, I just want to see some images.
October 5, 2008 at 3:30 am
I think this ads will be interesting only to porn sites.
October 5, 2008 at 2:17 am
Interesting, as PPC advertiser myself I’d like to see how I can use it.
October 4, 2008 at 11:43 pm
I had always wondered about this, as to why they didn’t incorporate this sort of a thing a while ago, or at least keep it around?
October 5, 2008 at 2:19 pm
i don’t see why they’d use ads in images in the first place.
October 4, 2008 at 10:43 pm
o/t but kimbo just got tko.
October 4, 2008 at 7:31 pm
More G ads, more money. I tip my hat to them yet again.
-Mike
October 4, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hopefully Google tries some better positions for those ads as the UX is pretty bad from what I can see in the screenshot.
On a related note, why doesn’t Google pro-actively provide an option on their Google Images sub-section that they can also return results specifically for faces?
For example:
–
General image query: http://images.google.com/images?q=gellar
Face specific image query: http://images.google.com/images?q=gellar&imgtype=face
They go out of their way to tell the end user that they are in “face” mode via a standard message: “Showing only images containing faces (show all images)”
But they won’t offer this option unless users who know how to use the imgtype variable in the URL ;(
October 4, 2008 at 4:37 pm
overanalyze much? if you owned google images wouldnt u try a bunch of different things to monetize it?
October 7, 2008 at 7:39 am
I agree they should try to monetize it, they could make a lot of money off of it
October 4, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Target ads are always terribly “untargeted” (Pun intended)… so they’re a pretty bad sample to go off of.
October 4, 2008 at 4:07 pm
more easy money for Google
October 4, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Btw, for people who do not know this, I stumbled into a cool page yesterday:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
They’ve basically taken the monotonous and often spam-filled job of adding tags to pictures and labeling them into a fun and accurate game. Truly genius.
October 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm
yea its a great way for google to get their images labeled, we are doing all the work for them
October 4, 2008 at 2:17 pm
What do you think about the new Google Image Labeler?
October 4, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It’s not so “new” anymore, it’s been out since Aug. 2006, but I think it’s a very creative way to get the bored masses to tag and label images for free without payment.
Google has successfully made the monotonous task of labelling images “fun”, which is a smart trick in my book
October 4, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Its meant as a game but we are really doing work for Google,
its still fun though
October 5, 2008 at 2:20 pm
they have… MIND CONTROL… lol
October 4, 2008 at 1:43 pm
What Google is doing is not getting optimum results, but more of a chance that Google will later get it right than not get it right.
October 4, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Google has no algo, they just trying to scare us all with wild stories … It’s a conspiracy and we need to stand together and go to msn
hahah
October 4, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I think I saw a case study saying Yahoo! displays more relevant results, lets head over there!
October 9, 2008 at 3:59 am
Of course Yahoo! would say that, but Google is more accurate.
October 4, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Looks shit to me, and I can imagine the conversion rates being really low, after all people are looking for an image not to buy something..
October 4, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I agree images bring low conversions as it is, now paying for it, wont be worth it
October 9, 2008 at 3:58 am
I agree with this. A lot of people just leave after they find the image they’re looking for. I’ve noticed this on several websites. People are looking just for images and nothing else.
October 4, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Interesting. I was wondering when they were going to do something like this. As they said, it isn’t relevant to the other searches at all. Hopefully this will improve soon.
October 7, 2008 at 3:15 am
I saw it coming too. It was just a matter of time.
October 4, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Just looks like they need to tweak the algorithm.
October 4, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Even if they dont do anything and place ads they are going to generate millions.
October 5, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I agree they will make loads of money Im surprised they
didn’t do this earlier
October 4, 2008 at 12:03 pm
the ads looks promising…
one more top from google.
October 4, 2008 at 11:58 am
Awesome, as an affiliate this obv opens a whole new realm of possibilities.
October 5, 2008 at 6:55 am
If so would it be okay.
October 4, 2008 at 11:25 am
I’m wondering what the Guinness logo has to do with buffalo logos?
October 4, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Apparently a barstool called “buffalo”.
October 4, 2008 at 10:36 am
I’ve often wondered why their image results weren’t monetized in the first place. I don’t think I ever go online anymore where I don’t end up using Google Image Search.
October 4, 2008 at 10:39 am
BTW, Jeremy. I saw where I finally won a daily drawing. I’m pretty stoked. I didn’t think I would ever get drawn.
I’m not sure when you send out the email, but I haven’t gotten anything in my inbox, or junk mail.
October 4, 2008 at 11:12 am
you should have gotten it right away. check your spam folder
October 4, 2008 at 5:49 pm
No luck on the email. Check spam, checked junk mail, checked inbox. But nothing. I even have your domain white listed on my mail server.
October 9, 2008 at 4:00 am
It’s great to see Jeremy replying to a comment here. A lot of webmasters don’t even comment on their own blogs. It’s good to listen to your viewers.
October 4, 2008 at 11:59 am
Grats man, it’s always exciting to win
October 4, 2008 at 2:21 pm
i never win s*** keep playing the lotto one a year and it never happens… ;?
October 4, 2008 at 4:05 pm
congrats on winning, its always good to win something
I never win anything
October 9, 2008 at 3:59 am
Congratulations on winning Steven!
October 4, 2008 at 10:26 am
The sponsored ad is so distinct. And may users will be tricked rather than actually using them.
If i want to advertise, i am not in using image search. Do i get to choose?
October 4, 2008 at 4:12 pm
There will probably be a choice in the Adword’s panel if it is ever introduced to adwords.
October 4, 2008 at 10:13 am
Aslong as they’re good, quality images then I don’t mind.
October 4, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Relevant as well… Wouldnt want to be looking for pictures of food and up with ads for various body parts.
October 5, 2008 at 12:14 am
yes mate we all need quality.
October 7, 2008 at 3:13 am
Quality is one thing that should never be compromised.
October 7, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Yea Google is all about quality so I don’t think they will change
that
October 4, 2008 at 10:07 am
what’s funny is that when people search images, they are not even thinking about visiting those sites. they just want the image that is related to what they are looking for. placing of the ads may just cause people to right mouse click to copy the image without realizing that its an ad…
anyway, that is just how i see it. does anyone else see it that way?
October 4, 2008 at 10:33 am
Yep, that’s exactly how I see it.
I predict a rise in copyright cases due to google search soon.
October 4, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Exactly what I thought.
October 4, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I agree they shouldn’t allow you copy the image
October 4, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I disagree with your comment, I get overly large percentage of visitors which were moved towards my sites because my images appeared in Google’s image index.
I have opted into Google’s “enhanced image search” program that allows for your site’s images to be actively crawled, leading to a site index to be formed specifically for your images. This is great for those of us who may own sites that are image focused, such as wallpaper/avatar sites.
With this in mind, I wonder what kind of impact the advertising will have on the “free” traffic people got from organic search queries stemming from Google image search?
October 5, 2008 at 2:33 am
you know what, you’re right, i didn’t think about sites that specialize on images. i just noticed that since i create custom animated gif ads for my affiliate programs, when people search for an image of that product, they copy the ad since its gif and already animated and use it on their site. you can see a sample ad here: http://laberintosocial.com/wp-content/mbp-banner/Cash Making Sites Loop_20080921094326.gif
i wont go as far as putting a label on them, but then again, maybe i should? like a waterwark maybe? although it may be looked at as lame, considering that its an affiliate sale?
October 5, 2008 at 6:48 am
I think you are very well hit the issuance of Google. Experience has shown that this happens less frequently and it is not logical.
October 4, 2008 at 9:15 am
This was featured in a TIME article way back about Google. Apparently one of their employees came up with the idea pitched it to them, but they shot it down saying “How does this help our users?”, and left $60 million on the table. Too bad google doesn’t seem to care about that now.
October 4, 2008 at 11:23 am
$60 mil is nothing to a company like Google, not worth dampering the user experience…. however, 60mil is 60mil and that’s real money.
October 4, 2008 at 1:00 pm
60 million is lot of money even for google.
they want to take every penny from you.
October 4, 2008 at 2:06 pm
U R a GeniUS
October 4, 2008 at 3:12 pm
You sir are a true cut-throat american capitalist.
Cheers!
October 4, 2008 at 3:58 pm
not really, a lot of times big companies won’t waste their time on the smaller projects – truth is, $60 mil in revenue is not quite enought to move the needle for a company of this size. I’m not saying 60mil isn’t a lot of money cause it is.
October 5, 2008 at 12:16 am
60 million is a heck of a money.
October 7, 2008 at 3:11 am
$60 mil is lots of money, even for a big comapany like Google. It is a boost at some level.
October 7, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I agree they wouldn’t turn it down if they could get that much
money
October 4, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Found the original piece by Time Magazine. The figure is actually $80 million, and this was way back in 2006.
“The engineers tell Brin and Page that they can generate extra advertising revenue by adding small sponsored links to image-search results, as Google already does with text searches. “We’re not making enough money already?” Page asks. Everyone laughs. The share price has soared as high as $475, making Google, in market-cap terms, the biggest media company in the world. (The stock plummeted early this month on earnings that Wall Street didn’t like, although it’s still far above its 2004 IPO price of $85.) The engineers press on. Their trials predict the tweak would be worth as much as $80 million a year in additional revenue. Brin isn’t moved. “I don’t see how it enhances the experience of our users,” he says. It probably wouldn’t hurt it much either. But the Google guys reject the proposal–”Let’s not do it,” Brin declares, to the engineers’ obvious disappointment–leaving the $80 million on the table.”
Read full article here: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1158961,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-bottom
October 4, 2008 at 8:50 am
Adding image ads to an image search makes it very distracting… and even if the image was what I’m looking for, chances are it’ll be copyrighted!
October 4, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Most of the images you are “looking for” are probably copyrighted anyway.
October 4, 2008 at 8:41 am
The way they are doing it now will cause many problems and be a failure if they release it to the public like that. It diminishes the user experience and advertisers will get very low quality accidental traffic and pull out of it. At the very least they need to put the ads in their own area off the the side but they need to do a little more than that IMHO.
October 5, 2008 at 6:46 am
I think that this problem will be resolved soon.
October 7, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I think they will make sure it is in the right spot before they release it to the public
October 4, 2008 at 8:20 am
Well if they can make more money from it Im sure they will do it
October 4, 2008 at 12:58 pm
No doubt about that.
October 7, 2008 at 3:09 am
Google is all about the money. But they do manage their operations quite well though with clients and users as priority.
October 4, 2008 at 8:02 am
I think Google should also implement related images search links in the top,
remove dead images links asap & also add some rating
feature using which visitors can rate the search images.
But I surprise they never had ads in place at image search.
May be this things will get better but I wonder how its going work out.
One question Shoe:Have you heard of them asking AdWords users to upload images?
October 4, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Their goal is speed… Bloated features would way it down and Google’s image search is target for really quick searches… In depth, just go to Flickr.
October 4, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I think it’s just a BETA kind of thing for now, so I doubt adword’s advertisers have access to it yet.
October 4, 2008 at 7:55 am
is there anything left for google to monetise?
October 4, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Yes they havent monetized their homepage yet and gtalk service.
October 4, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Space.
October 4, 2008 at 4:10 pm
They are having trouble monetizing Gtalk, Google Earth, Google Gears (which I doubt will ever monetize), and Youtube.
October 4, 2008 at 5:52 pm
my mind.
October 5, 2008 at 5:45 am
errrr….religion?
October 7, 2008 at 3:08 am
Trust me, Google will always find something to monetize. I doubt they’ll run out of ideas now, even if it seems like they have explored everything already out there for them.
October 4, 2008 at 7:27 am
That’s kind of interesting. If they decide to go ahead with it, I’d imagine it will start out a bit rocky… hopefully getting better.
Visual distractions ARE easy to pick out. Much more obnoxious than text!
October 4, 2008 at 7:03 am
Quite eerie in amongst the images themselves, above the search images would fit better IMO. Will google really choose more clicks over a better user experience?
October 4, 2008 at 8:12 am
YES IT IS A COMPANY DOING BUSINESS.
October 4, 2008 at 8:51 am
Google’s success has a lot to do with treating users right. So I think clearly separating sponsored images is a good idea.
October 7, 2008 at 3:05 am
Yup, I totally agree. As long as sponsored images are clearly separated from the result images, that would be great.
October 4, 2008 at 5:06 pm
*cough* Your CAPs lock seems to be stuck.
October 4, 2008 at 8:18 am
It’s not really “in” the images, it’s off to the side and in that barely-visible gold background. The vast majority of people won’t care.
October 4, 2008 at 9:17 am
I bet they will care for the first part because most are used to seeing all the related images and in a row so many will try and copy or save the sponsored image, only to realize that they’ve clicked a completely irrelevant ad.
October 5, 2008 at 5:45 am
I like your perspective. You definitely got a point there, it will happen to inexperienced users, but monkey soon learns to avoid the highlighted pics, no matter how subtly they’ve been integated….;-)
October 4, 2008 at 10:08 am
what if they created a “sink” effect where the ads dropped off a bit on the right hand side?
October 4, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Like you mean table padding?
That could work.
October 7, 2008 at 8:22 am
I think that you are right in that they won’t care as long as it is relevant to their search. If this happens google will work it out…if they can do it for relevant searches on their sites then this is just a problem that already has a solution….it just needs to be found
October 4, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Why wouldn’t they?
October 4, 2008 at 4:02 pm
That would be a great idea so it doesn’t bother the users
October 4, 2008 at 7:03 am
I expect them to do something similar in adsense for images.
October 4, 2008 at 9:43 am
That will be a good idea.It will add some beauty to the pages-hopefully if they are really relavant.
October 5, 2008 at 12:20 am
i think the main problem is that ads will not relavant.
October 5, 2008 at 5:40 am
I agree that relevance will be key here. Expect loads of articles on how to effefectively SEO your images…..heheheheh
October 4, 2008 at 10:08 am
if my 300×250 ads could appear on image results, i’d buy into that…
October 5, 2008 at 5:41 am
Agreed. A picture is worth a thousand words….sometimes.
October 4, 2008 at 11:22 am
they already do something similar for adsense, i.e. advertisers can have image based ads
October 4, 2008 at 12:02 pm
yes, we want images beside adsense ads… why don’t they listen our plea ?
October 4, 2008 at 8:03 pm
hehe, Google gonna see this and listen to your plea definitely!