1. ?? I’m confused. AdSense has always acted like that, as far as I know. I see the search box if there’s not enough text or Google doesn’t want to serve ad links. And the ad links have always gone to pages full of ads. What am I missing?

   1. You’re right. It’s not the first time I see a search box to search for ads instead of a regular text ad. It was always like this I believe.

      1. I’ve never seen a search box before. Its always been plain old ads
         for me.

         1. Google is the biggest game in town. Most small publishers like me have very few other options to earn ad revenue except using google..

   2. Right. It’s always been like that, don’t know why TechCrunch thinks it’s new.

      1. Ok so I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that has seen this box before or thought “what are they talking about?”

   3. yeah, well google is nothing more than a big problem now. They are so money hungry that it is sickening. I wish that webmasters would stop dealing with them altogether, (as far as using them for advertising purposes I mean such as Adwords, etc). I say stick to social networking to increase online sales.

      1. I agree, Google seems to be getting very money hungry. I guess they’re really trying take over the world wide web.

2. Could this not be a glitch in the system?
   It seems like everyone is taking this economic downturn pretty seriously. How long do they think this will last for???
   Lucky I have a job and an entrepreneurs blog to keep me going

   1. i dont think its a glitch. Google just wants to boost its revenue, even I am lucky that i have a stable job.

      1. I agree. Google just wants to earn more money.

         1. I don’t agree, Google always want more user friendly website and ads

   2. Well you sound like you’re sorted. Having more than one source of income is vital in this time of age. I do think this global economic strain is about to blow over, it’s been on for quite some time now, enough time for solutions to have been thought out. But everyone is still freaked out about it, and with some people it’s only now that it hitting them how bad the world economy is.

3. The link ads and the search box have been working the same way from over a year, no idea why techcrunch wanted to thrash Google Adsense for nothing.

   1. yeah, this didn’t come as a surprise to me at all, because google adsense ads have been like this for quite some time, and only now people are noticing???

4. I thought Google did not allow Adsense on sites that use Google trademarks in the domain name?

   1. Any reference?

5. They are also allowing gambling web sites to advertise on google adwords in the UK now. I recon it won’t be long until gun merchants will be able to set up PPC campaigns as well 🙂

   1. Fear not, most guns have registered brand names and those manufacturers would probably block everyone from using Google AdWords to advertise under their brand names, except for their own direct affilates or themselves!

   2. LMFAO! 😀

6. Yeah – this is the way this has always worked.

   The question still remains: Why doesn’t Google follow its own guidelines?

   1. Well I guess, they make the rules, so they can also break them.

7. Haha, I would not be surprised Google hiring Indians and Pakistanis to click their own Adsense adds in the near future!

   Google will do anything to keep up the appearance they are healthy and making money!

   Did not Google do this already, at the beginning when they started Adsense? Maybe they will go Chinese this time around! Diversity! Or cloak IPs! 😉

   1. Thanks for the predjudice 🙂

      1. No karma for you!

         (Igor The Troll)–

   2. And masked all the IPs and had a few of them convert so the advertisers would never find out! Igor, you are one smart troll not.

   3. This is very original.

8. i think google adsense are too many rules that difficult to publishers

   1. That’s one of the reasons I stopped using it.

   2. yeah true, but they seem to break their own rules if ti’s going to profit them.

9. Google just keeps changing the “game” on us don’t they? I am happy to hear they are giving pages a quality score if it seems the page is a made for adsense site. That always helps the ppc content network to get more quality clicks.

10. adsense might just start to get interesting 🙂

11. I don’t know where this article comes from. I see this features in Adsense for over 1 year. Nothing new

12. The View Ads search box has been in the Google search engine for a long time now it’s nothing new. The other ad formats mentioned here are new though. I would be lucky if my website got mentioned in Tech Crunch’s post, I would get a lot of clicks! 😀

    I’m surprised Tech Crunch didn’t cover the newer ads I recently noticed. The newer ads appear in the leaderboard and they show related products with prices and you can click each product to see that product.

13. It is always hard to the right thing, than the thing which will bring in the money….
    Well we have not heard “Do No Evil” for a very long time..

14. This is BS! This action is in-line with the for-profit corruption that has ruined Ebay in my opinion. Ebay used to be a usable and relatively inexpensive way to find cool stuff or sell your junk. It seems to be a growing trend, anything for money, that even the airline industry is embracing. I am ready for a google competitor to emerge and take second seat.

    1. It’s going to be a while until that happens. “Cuil” (http://www.cuil.com/) tried and they failed miserably, even with having ex-Google employees on their team.

15. Same old story – you have to play by their rules but they can do whatever they want.

16. Yaawwwnnn!!! What a non story! The only newsworthy bit of news in that post is the fact that Google are still doing well against all a background of financial meltdown. But then again I guess that’s not what the Google/Adsense haters want to hear is it?

    1. Google’s still doing well but at what expense? As I’ve said in the past what happens if they’re close to not meeting expectations? They can ban thousands of accounts at a moment’s notice to make up the difference.

       The lack of recourse or oversight with Adsense is ridiculous.

       1. Why, they’re a private company and not some sort of government social security policy? Then can operate however they like. Some people will take advnatge of it, other’s won’t but Google actually don’t owe us anything.

          1. Google is a public company: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog

          2. Public Limited Company, it’s still a PRIVATE SECTOR business and not a PUBLIC SECTOR business i.e. part of government.

             They (CEO and Board) are free to operate how they choose, within the law of course.

17. Same case, Google serve ads like that 1 year ago, what’s the big difference?

18. I’ve been saying this for a couple of years and it’s now happening as you see. Google was first a company run by two computer geeks not necessarily looking for gazillions of dollars so quality was their main concern. Then Google made billions and there’s now an administrator board and Google has to grow every year to keep the share holders happy. Google is now a big corporation and like every big corporation ran by an administrator board, profit prevails. We will see more of this in the future.

    1. You hit the nail on the head. Corporations have only one goal: Make more money than the previous day. Sooner or later, this becomes the downfall of the company, but for now, Google is riding high.

19. Is this a joke? The meat of the article is about features that have always worked this way and putting some spin on it as if it was new.

20. Let’s just say Google has to answer to their shareholders. To report increase in earnings is getting more difficult and they can’t afford to be choosy.

    http://seventoten.com

21. I haven’t noticed Google being really out of line with any of their policies. Just my two cents, though.

22. Google has never played by the same rules that it subjects others to. If an arbitrager tried to do something like this they’d be smacked with high minimums or banned as a thin affiliate site. Of course now that Google does it, well that’s ok because they have the User in mind. How this is best for the user I have no idea but I’m sure that’s how Google will try to spin it.

    1. Google is working only for themselves, like any other company. The main priorities of Google it himself.

23. It is really frustrating for advertisers to compete on adwords with Google when we don’t have a level playing field.

24. google is the best company in the world.

    1. Stating and point and not backing it up does absolutely nothing for your cause.

       1. Google sucks! When you do a search on Google you get allot of crap and 2 year old outdated material because they are so hell bent on their property sandbox system to prevent new fresh sites/material to be shown. They want you to grease their palms with adwords before they index you organically. They want to own the internet. They are internet Dictators. They have brain washed the masses into thinking they are the best search engine option out there when truly they suck!

          Ahhhhh, that vent felt good.

25. You know, I bet that ‘search for ads’ toy could be useful…

26. I also wonder if they are not burrying sites with adsense on them. I noticed an uptick in traffic on some pages with adsense that google delisted or buried earlier in the year. I wonder if they are just trying to get more eyeballs to get convert at 2%

27. New solutions will help to make more money.

28. as we all know… money makes the world go round

29. I started to use adsense on my site but had to take it off because it was giving adverts of my competitors. Does anyone know of anyway to control what adverts are used on your site so this doesn’t happen? Who knows what is happening to Google. Maybe they are just trying new things. The adsense search bar maybe something like the google search bar.

    1. Go into your control panel for AdSense, under Setup – you have a competitive filter where you are allowed to put in up to 200 urls for ads you don’t want to see on your site. It can take a few hours to take effect. Also, sometimes you can’t see the real url they’re advertising with, so you might want to find the AdSense Preview Tool to see if you can extract the url.

30. Ugh. And watching the stock price is killing me. Wish I had sold at 600!

31. party like it’s 2004. MFA is back in favor

32. Just another thing to remember about Google to try to comply.

33. It is still looking fine.

34. it’s all about money!! and Google, what can i do with google anyway!! i’m just a simply blogger!! but I love your blog… very interesting and informative..happy blogging!!

35. Whatever. I’m making money from Google either way!

36. I am definitely not complaining about having more ways to make money from google… 🙂

37. I don’t think it’s a big deal. They’re still the best so I doubt they’ll lose visitors.

    I think it’s a great time to buy GOOG. I just picked up some shares last week.

    1. I agree it is agood time if I hadn’t already bought them at a higher price 2 years ago. Pls Pls Pls go back up!

38. Hasn’t this been going on for a long while? I mean Google’s link ads have always lead to another page which has ads pertaining to what the original ad link said and they have been showing that search ads in the link box for well over a year!

    If you don’t want that then simply start using normal ad units which don’t contain this type of thing. Though Google was testing a feature a while back where apart from showing ad it also showed a search box to show more ads.

39. So where are these in game flash ads that you speak of? I’m yet to see any.

40. I read about this early this morning. It would be a shame if google manipulated their QS to start charging people more money. Obviously, Google doesn’t have enough money.

    1. This is a normal phenomenon in an atmosphere of world crisis. -)

41. Oh good old google doing whatever they feel like and making us work our assess off to satisfy them…

42. Google is online GOD. whatever God does, is right. You can’t ask any question. But you have to do things according to law, you are not God. Will these steps of Google cause decrease in traffic? And moreover people will still earn money.

    1. It’s true. I wish there were a few decent competitors to Google so they weren’t the “online GOD”

43. Google have been doing these things for the past year, and I haven’t heard anyone screaming about it until now.

    And now that someone at TechCrunch noticed it, OH MY GOD, the moon is suddenly going to crash down on us.

    *sigh*

    1. TechCrunch is an authoritative source. It must listen to be apprised of developments. -)

44. Google boys would tattoo adwords on their mamas foreheads it they would let them.

    1. That made zero sense!

       1. You better say nonsense 😀

45. Sweet… nice syndication of content that a lot of us probably already read.

    1. You would do the same thing if you were in Shoemoney’s shoes. Notice he said sometimes he would have posts appear on Techcrunch….What does that tell you? If Techcrunch wanted to enter into a partnership with you, would you turn them down?

46. Time for google to rewrite those policies. any major stock holders in here? 🙂

47. Google usually only put the search box there when it doesn’t have anything it thinks is relevant to your site.

48. When I first heard about this I wasn’t sure that I’d ever search for an ad but then my wife reminded me that she prefers looking at the ads on Google rather then searching. Her theory is that people who are paying to get our attention are likely to be offering content that we actually want to see.

    1. the search option in ads look funny who will search for ads?

    2. Same thing my mom does, I guess they are the perfect customers for online advertisers and one of the reason advertising business is growing 😀

    3. haha! now that’s funny, people searching for the ads believing that they will provide quality content.. well more money for us affiliates!

       1. You’re 100% right, it makes no sense but I can’t convince her that dishonest people would pay for ads. Actually the other day I saw her click the featured ad for apple.com at the top of Google instead of clicking the search result for apple.com right below .. it makes me wonder how much she’s costing companies.

49. While these are some interesting points, I think that some of our economic problems are simply due to media hype that causes people to become scared a little bit… Interesting to see Google doing this much more though

50. I have seen this recently as well as an even further downturn of CPC. In my entertainment niche websites which usually had terrible cpc numbers such as 2-10 cents a click are now averaging around 1-5 cents a click. Luckily I have relationships now with high paying CPM advertisers and don’t rely on google other than one text link. I wish Google would just take a small hit right now to keep its high quality since that is what it is known for.

51. Wonder how long they’ll stay “not evil.”

    1. I think they become the evil long ago, we are not able to understand it. But when we will understand it, there will be no way back. Google took so much control over the mental realm of the users and webmasters.

       1. I would say they will slowly turn “evil” or at least more like other corporations. As a public company it would be difficult for them to avoid the pressures of Wall Street.

52. The good thing is that if google is making more money with adsense than so are we if we have adsense on our site so its still good

    1. But if Google is making more from their own sites, it probably wouldn’t affect how much we make. Yet, it might actually decrease our earnings and the cpc because there will be more supply.

53. I am little bit shocked, now a days why Google is not approving the adsense accounts like earlier. It is simply declining the small sites or too early sites, or free sites.

54. Transparency when dealing with users is extremely important. When I was just a net surfer, I always closed any kind of ad or shareware that took me to ads rather than what I was legitimately surfing for. Great warning Shoe.

55. Everyone who uses adsense want clicks of course. It is the stuff that many blogs and forums were created for. My question, as an ad sense advertiser do you when visiting other sites you like give them an adsense courtesy click or are you to busy and selfish to waste your time doing so?

    My humble opinion is if you hope to make money with adsense you should have the courtesy to click an ad once when you visit a site you like. If you do not then stfu with the whining about why you do not get any clicks.

    It’s called KARMA folks!

56. I also noticed Google was putting ads up on flash, etc.

    Do you think people are becoming less receptive to advertising now that they are cutting their spending?

57. Question:
    For example, would showmethegolf.tv not get paid for a click until someone clicks to the syndication page and then clicks an ad on that page? That doesn’t seem fair.

58. I was going to say that this is old news, but some people already beat me to it. I’ve seen the Adsense search feature on some of my own sites for ages now.

59. […] Google Diluting Quality To Remain Profitable, ShoeMoney […]

60. I think this is a very good example of the moral hazzard problem that is sweeping the US financial system. Google isn’t planning on having an effective business model over the long term with these decisions. Instead they are made so that at every turn in the quartter they are turning a profit. This is an extremely dangerous position, as can be attested to by the CEO’s of AIG and Merrill Lynch, because eventually, without long term planning, it can all come down like a house of cards.

61. […] There’s a great case in point emerging as Google experiments in wringing more from Adsense – for example Adsense in Flash games, Adsense in Google Maps, Click-to-buy on Youtube, Adsense in RSS etc, and now an Adsense search box and adverts for pages of Adsense adverts. […]

62. yeh, they are not implementing their own rules 🙁

63. […] There’s a great case in point emerging as Google experiments in wringing more from Adsense – for example Adsense in Flash games, Adsense in Google Maps, Click-to-buy on Youtube, Adsense in RSS etc, and now an Adsense search box and adverts for pages of Adsense adverts. […]

64. Hmm.. So I guess even Google is being affected by the crisis.

65. They’re walking a dangerous line. Once their ads stop being user friendly and start being ugly/irritating, they’ll see their market share drop through the floor. They’re not the highest paying ad network around and it’s not too difficult to switch.

66. So as well as Google experiments in wringing more from Adsense how do you think the policy change for Google.co.uk on Gambling will add to adsense revenues for sites? Surely this is a goldmine for affiliates that will pull people even closer to adsense?

    1. PS. I love the branding on the sheep – being from Wales and all that..

67. Well google is taking the bull by its horns.

68. More obvious proof that Google is diluting quality, and not with just their adsense?

    How about the new Google phone, or Google Chrome. Both aren’t very good quality in my opinion.

69. Google got a lot of love early on for it “Don’t Be Evil” mantra. Now that they are number 1, and rock solid in that position, that seems to be changing.

    They should remember “No one cheers for Goliath.”

70. It’s a slowing economy and Google needs to make money like everyone else… just not sure if I’m ready for sponsored links going to sponsored pages full of links to more sponsored sites

71. 5 stars article! Thanks Shoe. I am a little bit confused about Google.

72. […] Google Diluting Quality To Remain Profitable Is the “chrome” coming off of Google? Well it appears that may be the case. Recently ShoeMoney and others have noticed some clear acts by Google of lowering the quality of their search results and AdSense services by for example sending AdSense traffic to syndication pages, or showing an AdSense search box instead of an Ad. Clearly this contravenes their own quality guidelines and the only reason for doing it would be to collect more revenue from clicks. Google – don’t go crazy because you’re still the search giant and have everything to lose and much less to gain. For more on this have a look at ShoeMoney’s story! […]

73. I’m not complaining about having more ways to make money from google! why not, bring on the adsense monetization to the fullest 🙂 When they start demonetizing, then we know they are becoming “demon”ized or evil!

74. Google needs to think about there strategies the pay rate is decreased a lot and the latest one Custom search engine i feel it is not working properly …for instance we tested it but nothing get converted….

75. Of all the people, it should be google, who should take such low quality steps.
    Come on google,you can do better..

76. making me frustation….google too many rules

77. […] epurarea asta nu se face intodeauna direct, la nivel de micro intreprindere. Shoemoney explica intr-un articol ceva mai vechi cum Google incepe sa impinga si advertiserii pe drumul ingust al […]

78. Why is google loosing money with new Social networking websites?
    for example orkut don’t have any ads on it, can you see how much that Social networking site cost every day with bandwidth?

79. noticed that the AdSense text links on his golf site are directing readers not to a product page with information about a “Tiger Woods Caddy” or “Golf Wear,” but rather to a Google Syndication landing page filled with more AdSense ads (see screenshot below).

    Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Google can only dilute the quality for so long before they are no longer the number one search engine.

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