| There's the other problem of decreasing contrast and lack of borders separating the last ad and first organic search result. http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... A few years ago this was the style http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screen... Before that http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_... Now http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png Some of those keywords are worth tens of dollars per click so no wonder,the colors have been A/B optmized to get the most clicks from people not knowing they are ads. Comparison: Google: #fff7ec
Bing: #f9fcf7
Yahoo: #fafaff
DuckDuckGo: (255,212,0,0.18) Not to say that Bing, Yahoo etc. are much better but I expect more from the "Do No Evil" Google rather than increasing the next quarter's earnings instead of targeting older people and people with bad monitors and hurting people who did a lot of good work to come in the first few in organic results but don't and/or can't pay Google for expensive ads. Also, Bing and the rest continue to mostly lose money and they can't afford to separate ads while the big guy continues to reduce the difference between ads and search results. "Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphol... |
The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't even realize the page contained ads.
[1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm
[2] http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results