shorebreak - 4:12 pm on Dec 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

[I say the following with the utmost respect for those who create well thought out landing pages and experiences for their users, and with an understanding that Google's implementation of this feature is imperfect and is likely to improve drastically over time.]

Waaaaaah, Google's examining my landing page for relevancy, waaaah.

Grow up and be a man!

Google has 65% of the global search market ***because it continues to out-monetize anything else out there***; it got the that point primarily by factoring in CTR. Lest we forget, Google is the shizzle because it provides all of us huge volumes of high-quality traffic - and you can get that volume of quality traffic without being the best search system in the world.

Now that Google has correctly understood that ad copy is easily manipulated and therefore a poor proxy for a good user experience, Google is examing the landing page itself. This makes perfect sense for Google, perfect sense for the searcher, and perfect sense for the progression of the search marketing industry towards better ad targeting, better websites and higher conversion rates.

IMO, this is a first step towards Google becoming a revenue share-based search engine, and those who are whining about this should focus on giving feedback to Google that will ensure *proper implementation* of a change whose result will be to push advertisers to increase conversion rates and focus on the user experience.

-Shorebreak