"Sponsored Link" Colors changing

Lighter and lighter

[Marcos]

Google used to distinguish clearly between real results and pay ads like "Sponsored Link". To do that, they used to have a "Sponsored Link" banner plus a dark colour background. Now, the background colour is rotating every time you reload, and some of the colours are so light that they look almost white, prompting some confusion between "Sponsored Link" and legitimated search results. Have anybody else noticed that?

[jeremy goodrich]

I think there have been posts regarding that before, but it makes sense for them to do this, as they try to squeeze more and more money from their search engine.

Sort of like that 'glitch' earlier today. :)

Kind of makes me wonder if Google continues down that path, if we'll have white backgrounds for the sponsored links...thus making them look a lot more like search results.

[shady]

Google have made it very clear that the SE results and PPC are now and are intended to always be a completely seperate beast.
They appreciate the mistakes made by other SE (e.g. Altavista) and are strict that PPC will not dilute the high quality of their listings.

[Marcos]

Google have made "very clear" a lot of things, shady. Maybe not all of them hold true.

Right, jeremy. The last update, that 'glitch' earlier today, lighter colours, and 1/3 bigger addwords boxes. Well, can you see a trend, here?

[chiyo]

On my monitor (laptop with maybe fewer colors), I have not been able to see the difference between sponsored and real links for at least 12 months..

[shady]

I guess so Marcos. I still think they are in the position of offering the highest quality SE and they would be fools to jeopardize that. I'm sure they realise that short term profit boosts are not worth risking their company for!

[cminblues]

#FFF6E1
#FFEBFF

These are now the background colors of the "2 sponsored links" page.
Copy down them, and let's see what will happen in the future..

It would be very useful if someone had the previous colors in some old saved/cached pages. :)

cminblues

[edited by: cminblues at 2:06 am (utc) on Oct. 17, 2002]

[shady]

The background color is changing everytime I refresh!