Now, I’m sure a Google PR person would insist that this tiny bit of text is a clear and unambiguous visual distinction but they’d be lying to you hoping that you are unfamiliar with eye-tracking research showing how little things like that matter, not to mention the way Google has trained users not to notice by using the smallest icon sizes and progressively removing as many visual indicators over the years as they think they can get away with.
The fact that people at Google feel the need to claim that this is a meaningful distinction tells you that it isn’t. Nobody at Google got defensive about this back when they didn’t offer advertisers a way to get the top result because it was completely obvious that ads were separate.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/
Remember when Google highlighted ads in different colours? Like the garish pink and green from way back in 2001: https://edge45.co.uk/blog/google-adwords-evolution-timeline/ (scroll down to see it near the bottom)
Look at how they intentionally tried to differentiate the ad from the rest of the search results: large swaths of white space separate the top sponsored ads from the rest of the search results even in a time when monitors were smaller, with clearly different link and background colours, etc.
I wonder if anybody's built a browser plugin to provide Google search results pages that look like they used to back in 2001? ;-)
> It’s hard to imagine what Google looked like without ads
...I'm not too sure on that one, Colin. Not a whole lot of imagination required.
(DDG seems to do it the other way around: results have favicons, ads have nothing in that spot. anyways, adblocker back on)