December 2005 Archive

Remove Google Results

For users of Google's Personalized Search and their search history, a new experiment allows for the removal of pages and entire sites from the results. Matt posts about the new remove result option.

Google Ads Grow

It looks like Google has increased the font size for the headings on the ads that appear on the right-hand side of search results. Google Blogoscoped has screenshots comparing the before and after. Based on my comparisons with before and after, the ad text itself and the URLs are the same size but the header which is the only part of the side ad which is a link is now larger. Previously (in 2003), the side ads had colored backgrounds and the entire colored box. In those days, the ad text was also smaller and lighter colored. Now, the side ads are the same text size and color as regular results, but they just have less information (less descriptive text and no file size for example). Probably changed to increase click through rates, it makes it a bit more difficult to distinguish the advertisements from the regular Web search results.