Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are looking at.
In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use.
I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.
You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?
But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search experience better for power users.
Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/... which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models.
Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.
Percentage aside, I think it is perfectly reasonable that Google reserves a lot of space for ads. What pays for the search results after all? I am surprised that people expect to get great service for free. It's just not sustainable.
What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result. If Google is confident about an Ad being information then why not let people click it for its relevance? Why make the background just barely different from the search result so that its almost impossible to visually separate ads from results? Let people clearly know that its an ad and let them decide whether they want to click on it or not.
Bing is as deceptive as Google here so not singling you guys out but please don't portray a reasonable effort to make money as a something larger than that.
>What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result.
I'm not sure if this is true as I almost never click on an actual add link rather then a search link. I'm not sure if this is subconscious (I'm simply not seeing the adds), but I think if it was deceptive I'd be clicking them all the time.
Those of us who are in marketing, publishing, & start ups are not generally an accurate reflection of the general market. We tend to be far more aware of advertising than a typical web user.
"Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!"
"So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page."
No doubt, especially since you work for Google. When ads are similar looking to content why even bother to do a much better job to find content when ads can fill that void? Better content equals less clicks on ads.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
"Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "
Over the long run, maybe and that's if people notice it and if Google isn't able to buy traffic like it does with Firefox. Google loves to test things and they can find the sweet spot on the most profitable SERPs and niches.
The problem for Google is that soon enough people will notice what Panda and Penguin did.
I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.
I can't believe you're being honest here. Counting just the last couple days, terms I've seen useful ads are: "trek stores near <where I live>", "glue for wood", "coach usa" and "shuttle lga". Also for the vast majority of terms in my search history, which happen to be arcane technical questions, I don't see any ads at all.
In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use.
I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.
You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?