Mountain View, Calif. — Google is speedily marching ahead with its plans to integrate display advertisements into image searches, the search giant officially announced today via webcast, during a press event at the company’s headquarters.
“What we are announcing today is a new suite of image-related experiments in which we are pairing display ads with image search,” said R. J. Pittman, Google’s director of search product management.
Just exactly as the web searches from Google.com displays text advertisements on the right-hand side of the results page, ads will also be incorporated into Image search results.
There is an “absolute connection” between image search and commerce, Pittman, said at an event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
“If we can align the nature of the images from the advertisers with the nature of the images from Image Search, it will help users find more of what they are looking for. You will see that these renderings show a fairly seamless user experience rather than just a stack of ads across the top.”
Google became wealthy off of text ads that appear next to textual search results, but the company is working to build up its display ads too. Its acquisition of DoubleClick was instrumental in the push.
Google at present displays no ads, text or otherwise, in its search results after users were turned off at the idea, something that Google estimates costs it $200 million a year in revenue. Since acquiring DoubleClick in March however Google has the technology and resources to move forward on smartly integrating visual ads into image search results.
Google AdSense does show image advertisements on third party sites, but what the company is advocating now is a much bigger initiative that will see image advertisements on Google’s own properties, as well as more advanced ones on AdSense.
As Pittman demonstrated, the ads are set off from regular results with a pale yellow background. But the company clearly wants the ads to be useful.
In Pittman’s slides, some ads were impossible to differentiate from organic results except for a yellow background and a “sponsored links” tag. They were the same size, the same format, etc. — and they were not set to the side of the page.
“You will see that there is a kind of more seamless and complete user experience than just running a snap of ads down the side and across the top,” Pittman said. But Pittman reiterated that at this point, Google is still experimenting with these ads, and things may change depending on responses from users.
“How can we introduce advertising in a way that actually improves your image search experience?” asked Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, at the event.
Google started displaying the image ads since the last two weeks to a small subset of users, Mayer said. It is not clear when it will be fully ready, but Mayer estimated 2009.
Pittman passed on the difficulty of contextually matching ads with images. With possibly trillions of images on the net, each with their own varied descriptions (or no description), sorting them is “a challenge.”
Pittman, whose earlier works included founding “web2.0 search company” Groxis, said “it should be within Google’s grasp” to improve the image search interface and hinted at retooling Google’s current image search by making it more people-like in its method than machine-like.
Google is exploring on more powerful facial recognition, for example, soon to be available via advance search options. Geolocation data is another area Google is looking on to improve the process of recognizing an image and making them easier to find, which makes the approach seem much like Tim Berners-Lee’s semantic web idea.
Pittman stated people are using image search beyond just “pretty pictures.” They are using it for recipes, travel destinations and gifts, as examples. This is leading to a better connection between image search and e-commerce, as well as a better experience for visitors and advertisers, he said.
Google could net anywhere from $1 – $2 billion a year in revenue, according to some industry analysts, if it integrates visual ads into its own search results. With Google’s stock price falling the company needs to roll out this new kind of a money-generating service, rather than yet another “We will figure out how to make money on it later” type product the company is famous for.
Mayer declined to comment on the revenue implications of the move, but said Google does not want to sacrifice usefulness for the new ad opportunity. For example, Google tried text ads on image search but did not like what it found, and therefore went back to the drawing board.
“They degraded the user experience on image search,” causing people to search less, Mayer said in an interview. “It is not a huge amount of fall-off, but we were not willing to cash in user happiness to make revenue.”