Google has begun showing ads on search results at its Picasa site for sharing photos, part of its gradual expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties.
Pages for photos and galleries doesn't show ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are located in a yellow-tinted "sponsored links" section above the photo results for some in the United States. (See screenshot below.)
"As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're looking for, we are currently showing text ads on the search results pages for Picasa Web Albums. This experiment 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.
Google, trying to increase profitability, has been spreading ads to sites that previously lacked them. Among them: Google Finance, Google News, image search, Google Maps, and Google Earth.
Google is showing ads on search results at its Picasa photo-sharing site. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)(Via the unofficial Google Operating System blog.)
Google's search-ad business is a money machine, but every now and again the company manages to squeeze out a little revenue from other parts of its business. And on Wednesday, Google announced one such deal with another Silicon Valley power, Adobe Systems.
Google Site Search lets customers endow their Web sites with a customized search engine derived from Google's broader index, and Adobe is using it in two ways, said Nitin Mangtani, Google's lead product manager for enterprise search.
First is Adobe's new Community Help search site, which presents search results from thousands of Adobe-selected sites. There are plenty of sites with Lightroom development presets, Photoshop editing recipes, Flash programming tips, and other such information, so if successful, the Adobe site--in beta for now--could be a more effective way to dig up what's online.
Second, that community search ability is built into Adobe's new CS4 suite of applications for image editing, illustration, video production, and Web site design. Adobe already had moved to an HTML-based help system, so extending to the Community Help site was probably not too complicated.
Google has thousands of customers for Site Search. It's available as a free, ad-supported service, but customers also can pay for ad-free, Google-logo-optional versions costing $100 per year for indexing up to 5,000 Web pages or $500 per year for up to 50,000 pages.
Adobe fits into a higher-end category to accommodate the higher volume of search traffic and the millions of indexed pages, Mangtani said, but declined to share terms of the deal.
Update 3:50 p.m. PDT: Adobe wouldn't comment on the terms of the deal either, but it did supply some more information.
For one thing, here's how it picked which sites to index: "We asked experts in the community--prominent bloggers, training partners, book authors, etc.--which URLs do they keep handy in their bookmarks folder? We also have a few favorite sites of our own that our doc writers and tech leads visit regularly," said Mark Nichoson, product manager for Adobe Community Help, in a statement. "We don't include the Adobe Store or marketing info...and we don't include every Adobe-related site on the Web. Our goal is to ensure access to the most relevant, high-quality sites so that users can get the answers they need, no matter where those answers may be found."
More than 3,000 sites are indexed so far, and Adobe encourages the public to suggest others that should be added.
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