Google search breaks the ad guidelines

[phil]

Hello, Google breaks the ad guidelines.. because there are more ads than search results.

For instance I can count 19 ad links to 10 organic search results the vast majority of the time.

Also the shopping result listings are always paid for but google does not label sufficiently that these are ads and even in the small disclaimer google uses ambiguous language to trick searchers into thinking that these ads are not all ads.

"Google maybe compensated by some of these listings"

.... erm no google is compensated for them all!


Also the ads take up a huge side bar column which by the way if you are using a desktop is in the center of the screen, and a huge block at the top too.... whilst the real results are just displayed to the side...

All in all it is pretty hard to distinguish ads from not ads.

All that being said adblocker plus does a great job... it would be great if adblocker plus could look into the whole more ads than search results on google issue.

[ManuelC]

Hello, Google breaks the ad guidelines.. because there are more ads than search results.

For instance I can count 19 ad links to 10 organic search results the vast majority of the time.

Also the shopping result listings are always paid for but google does not label sufficiently that these are ads and even in the small disclaimer google uses ambiguous language to trick searchers into thinking that these ads are not all ads.

"Google maybe compensated by some of these listings"

.... erm no google is compensated for them all!


Also the ads take up a huge side bar column which by the way if you are using a desktop is in the center of the screen, and a huge block at the top too.... whilst the real results are just displayed to the side...

All in all it is pretty hard to distinguish ads from not ads.

All that being said adblocker plus does a great job... it would be great if adblocker plus could look into the whole more ads than search results on google issue.

Hey Phil, thanks for raising your concern here. Would you be able to provide a link for me to reproduce the issue?

[phil]

I don't know whether a link will work because the search results tend to vary on things like location (im located in the uk) and activity. Searching for laptops gave me the following results.


On the first picture I had to zoom way out to get all the ads on screen.






I think this is a very important issue as the integrity of adblocker is at risk.

[chriswcs]

I have just searched 'laptps' and I receive none of those:

[lewisje]

Just FYI, you can reduce some of the variability by using the search parameter pws=0; for example, Google Search without personalization is https://encrypted.google.com/webhp?pws=0