Because our research requires we use the internet – a lot – we get to have a fairly good idea of how it all works. So we sometimes forget that the average internet user is not as savvy.
We have found that a surprising number of people do not understand that when they do a search (on Google, Yahoo, Live, or whatever..) the search results delivers “natural” results and ads. For example, a reader might find this site by typing “iphone downloads” into their favorite web browser. If that were Google then they might get a page that looks like:
The left side shows the “natural” search results in purple print (the center of this page has been deleted so that we could fit the image into the blog column) . These natural results are web sites that are highly relevant to the search query, deliver quality results and have proven to be the most popular websites for that search term.
The rest of the results on the page are ads!!
The ones in the pink section at the top, pay the highest amounts for their ads so that they can be listed above the natural search results (side step our preferences, as it were). The results on the right hand side are also paid ads (and – again, position depends on which site is willing to pay the most.
iPhonegizmo does not buy ads nor do we have adwords or banners etc on our blog. But we figure that whilst much of the internet is still free, it is worth knowing what are ads and what are not!
Especially, as Google has announced today that it is extending its Adwords options for iPhones. This means that advertisers can now target iphones and limit their campaigns to appear just for iPhones. Your Google search results look something like that show in the image on the left.
With the pink result being an ad.
Because these are even more integrated with the natural search results than for internet pages it may be difficult to know whether we are getting a high quality search result or just an ad! And as we are now being classed as a “target group”, we at iPhonegizmo reckons that iPhone users really do need to be aware of the difference between natural search results and ads.
Now you will know !