When Google introduced the concept of a minimum bid into the Adwords platform, I guess few advertisers and perhaps not even Google realized the effect it would have on their business.

Publicly, Google always maintains that relevance and user experience take priority over revenue generation and so the minimum bid was introduced to ensure that search engine users would not be bombarded with poor quality advertising. By raising the bar, Google forced advertisers to reconsider the ROI of their Adwords campaigns rather than spam the search results with ads by bidding en masse on cheap, non-commercial keywords in the hope of getting a few extra clicks.

Noble as the minimum was intended to be, most Adwords advertisers will be able to tell tales of being ‘slapped’ with minimum bids of up to $10 per click. Needless to say that very few businesses would be able to pay those prices and Google was never very forthcoming with a helpful explanation in order to lower them again.

On a bigger scale, the minimum bid also completely negated Google’s argument that it does not behave as a monopoly in the search engine advertising market. By setting a bottom, the free market auction for keywords becomes a whole lot less free and Google theoretically can tweak the minimum bids to squeeze the most out of its advertisers and boost its revenue. That is a factor the company cannot ignore as it keeps increasing market share and attracts ever greater scrutiny from governments and competitors.

By abandoning the minimum bid for a ‘first page’ bid Google hopefully will introduce again greater transparency into its advertising platform. More practically, Google’s move will reactivate a sizeable portion of ad inventory that currently sits dormant on its platform and give the company a boost in revenue in time for the upcoming holiday season.

So although as an advertiser we welcome the perishing of the opaque minimum bid, we will be keeping a close eye on our costs as a mass of previously inactive keywords comes back online.

(written by Nic, member of our adcopy team)

What do I want from Google? There is one thing that I have ALWAYS wanted for as long as I can remember and it is a simple little thing.

A RANDOMIZE BUTTON next to search results. Not the crumby “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that makes me think “I‘m Feeling Like Kicking Your…” instead when I search I want to be able to RANDOMIZE my results COMPLETELY. If I am doing research for something I don’t like combing pages and pages of links sorted by Google’s algorithm. To be honest I have little faith in the fact that the results are truly independent. Money makes the world go round and Google’s algorithms wouldn’t want to make a dent in the billions. So you get Google results.

I don’t disagree with this practice, they’re just looking after their own interests, HOWEVER, being able to randomize the results order for the same search phrase not only improves the depth of the current search (you view a variety of results that otherwise gets lost by a sorting algorithm) but also gives the proverbial ‘man on the street’ much more of a chance to show his stuff and I think it would improve research a lot.

I don’t think revenue would be lost as advertisements could still be displayed next to the search results - unless Google is using its algorithms to ’streamline’ the results order for its own financial benefit.

Yesterday, 28th July a new search engine was launched called Cuil.
The company claims that their search engine is the worlds biggest, having even more indexed pages that Google and Microsoft Live.

Much of the team responsible behind the creation and design of Cuil are ex-Google employees but the look-and-feel as well as functioning of the site unlike Google.

The ads on the site are on the left-hand side of the page, with a larger description text but still resembling the same format as used Google and Microsoft. When searching it provides more results at face, with similar search matches across a tab and well as categories to break down your search. The site is very responsive and quick but may be overwhelming to those used to Google’s minimalistic search engine.

The launch didn’t go completely as planned with various mishaps such as some popular search terms returning no results or an intermittent service.

Only time tell if this can complete and overtake Google to be the next-Google killer.