Google has changed the layout of it’s famously parsimonious and user-friendly results page, pushing adverts front and centre.
This marks the end of putting the user front and centre of the Google experience, in favour of a layout that drives adverts to dominate the search results page. It isn’t as bad as Ask yet, but it certainly is much worse, much worse than it was yesterday.
This in my view represents a turning point, away from the land grab (hunting) phase of Google’s core search offering towards the farming phase.
Google is full of smart people (lots of them), so this decision is not accidental but has come after months of testing and modelling. In the old days, we might have assumed a change on the core search was for improved usability. But this change pushes ads front and centre, so the rationale must be to increase ad-clicks per search. Not a user-driven feature but a monetisation feature.
Now, why would Google, after years of eschewing ads in the face advertising, make this change? Well because they have understood that the growth is tailing off. They have reached a point of saturation–there isn’t anything more to offer from the Google core offering–so now is the time to harvest the eyeballs.
So my abrupt take is that the geniuses in the Googleplex have decided there is a significant secular shift towards real-time search and information discovery enhanced by social greylisting (social network relevancy ranking). That challenge come from Twitter/Tweetmeme, Collecta, Facebook/Friendfeed, Aardvark and a few other things in the pipeline.
In other words, the value customers derive from this awesome algorithmic search is–by this proxy evidence and extended hypothesis–not increasing as much as it used to; and that means the rate of engagement is declining. And so the keep monetisation rates up, the big G is crowding the page with more ads than ever.
A disaster? Apart from having to get used toa new search experience, I think not. Products mature and get end to the end of their life. Smart companies take steps to maintain their sustainable economics early in the product lifecycle. (Dumb ones, cue any number of analogue media businesses, wait till the writing is on the wall before they take any steps to handle EOL.)
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