and evolutionary, say Google executives.
Sundar Pichai, Google's director of product management, and Nicholas
Fox, Google's group business product manager, addressed the
possibility of bundling image or video ads into Google's Universal
Search. The discussion took place Thursday at the Citigroup Technology
Conference in New York.
Fox says integrating video or image ads into sponsored search results
is an option that has come up in internal discussions, since search
ads are there to give users information that is most relevant to their
query. "In many cases that's a text ad," Fox says. "In some cases, it
may be an image, a video, or something else. But the risk is not
showing something garish or flashy, because users would become blind
to the ads and it would hurt the business long-term."
He gives the example of a local butcher: A video with shots of fresh
meat and the overall store experience would be more enticing than a
10-word text ad. More value is provided to both the consumer and
advertiser. Currently there is more thinking than action around the
issue at Mountain View, and for potential experiments, Google will
proceed "cautiously and slowly," Fox says.
According to Pichai, "the images and video ads you see today on
content networks are not what will work. They won't carry over well."
Any steps Google makes will have to be "incremental and evolutionary."
In terms of the overall Universal Search experience, Pichai
acknowledges that the search giant has a ways to go before every
search yields blended results.
"We've started triggering [Universal Search] on certain queries, but
not for all," Pichai says. "But we do have a good base to measure user
experience and satisfaction." While Google does not break down or
disclose details in terms of percentage of click-throughs or actual
number queries, the feature has been "well received."
When asked why Universal Search wasn't rolled out much sooner, given
Google's tech-intensive culture, Pichai says that solving the three
challenges of managing the infrastructure, determining relevance
ranking and keeping the user experience clean and unchanged took a few
years.
"People don't see the differences on the surface, because our goal is
to keep the user experience easy," Pichai says. "But Universal Search
is still in a nascent stage."
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