Back in 1998, Google founders Page and Brin published The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine describing the fundamentals behind their new Web search engine. While I would certainly recommend everyone to read the paper, for the purpose of this post, Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives is particularly worth a read. The section describes how search engines who have a business model that relies on advertising revenue are likely to be conflicted. They describe some situations where search results might be altered to please advertisers. As a result, they write “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers”.

Fast forward a few years and as it turns out, Page and Brin’s Google dominates the search scene and is massively profitable. Wait..what was that? Profit? Where’s this money coming from? Oh that’s right: advertisers. Well, to Google’s credit, they have not (as far as we know) allowed advertisers to directly influence their search results. Instead, AdWords ads (paid results) show up off to the right side of the (organic) search results page, clearly marked under a “Sponsored Links” section. Google’s position on this is that the ads don’t interfere with organic search results, but if you do want to see the ads they are clearly marked and since the ads are targeted to your search, there’s a good chance that they may actually help your search. Fair enough.

As of last week, something changed. The font size used for AdWords advertisements on Google search results pages got larger. The size is now the same size that is used for organic search results. While many users may not even notice the change, I personally find it very dubious. The motivation for increasing font size is to make ads more noticeable and thus more likely to be clicked. This increase in overall CTR brings more advertising dollars to Google and that’s certainly good news for the business.

However, is this just one of the first moves of many to increase ad CTR? I doubt it. Shareholder pressure to maintain profit growth may force the company to employ more tactics to drive ad revenue. Furthermore, what is the message that Google is sending to web publishers? Until now, Google (and of course all the SEO guys) emphasize that most users click on the organic results and not paid results (statistics show that the ratio of organic clicks to paid clicks is about 4:1-5:1) and so to generate traffic to your site, the most effective approach is to produce relevant, quality content and effectively structure it. Google prides itself on rewarding publishers who create good content. But will Google succumb to advertisers over the long-term? I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Brin and Page’s comments back in 1998 hold true.