We’ve all seen the rumors that Google has been testing various new search engine results pages (SERPs) but here is one that I haven’t seen before, a search box embedded within the SERPs. My buddy, Scott, pointed out to me that pulling up the query “Nasa” resulted in an embed search box *see image*.
This actually strikes me as useful because far too many people don’t understand the usefulness of the ‘site:’ search command. But while useful to users, this change could have an adverse affect on Adwords performance from an advertiser standpoint. Call me a pessimist but we could potentially see inflated ad impressions (resulting in decreased CTR) from users who are not in the buy cycle. If someone is searching a site, they are probably looking for something specific and not an ad so I’d rather not have my ads shown. Hopefully, if this becomes more widespread, there will be an option to be excluded from showing ads during a users’ embedded search search, which is essentially the ‘site:’ command. But given Google’s track record, there won’t be an option for exclusion and we’ll all be defaulted to participate!