Mountain View, California — Search engine giant Google is making every possible effort in an attempt to cover up every pixel on the web browser, has begun to display text ads when users search for public photos on its Picasa photo-sharing site, part of its stepwise expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties. During the past few months, Google has been busy grilling the services that were not yet monetized to improve its financial performances such as: Google Image Search, Google News, Google Finance and now Picasa Web Albums.
Google describes this an experiment, stating that the ads are visible only to a small number of US-based users. “Being part of our continued commitment to innovation and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they are looking for, we are currently showing text ads on the search results pages for Picasa Web Albums,” reads a company statement tossed our way.
“This test is only visible to a small number of U.S.-based users,” the company said in a statement. The ad experiment has been running for “a few weeks,” Google said.
Pages for photos and galleries does not display ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are placed in a yellow-tinted “sponsored links” section above the photo results for some in the United States.
However, this test could also be considered as part of Google’s relentless commitment to squeezing additional dollars from online services that have not served up ads in the past. In recent months, amidst a declining economy, the Mountain View, California Ad Company has injected new ads into Google News, Google Finance, Google Image Search, YouTube search, and more.
“At Google, we are great champions of experimentation because it is only by trying out new things that you discover better, more creative ways to operate,” reads a November blog post from the company. “We have been testing different advertising formats for years (some have been more successful than others), and over the next few months, you will see us continuing to experiment with new ads in new places.”
Picasa ads only appear when you search the Picasa site for pics. They do not appear on the picture pages of individual users. In other words, Google has shoehorned its primary money machine into the smaller world of Picasa’s search engine.
Now that the income from advertising venture is generated at a much slower rate than in the past, Google will probably launch more paid services like the App Engine or Google Apps Premier Edition. Even Google Checkout, a service that has been subsidized by Google for years, will use the same processing fees as PayPal from May.