MediaPost reports on comments, about image and video ads potentially appearing on Google, made by company speakers at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York this week. However, this is just a further acknowledgment and confirmation of what Marissa Mayer previously alluded to during the Universal Search unveiling in May.

At that time Mayer said:

Well we don’t have anything to announce on that today. I do think this opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

The MediaPost piece reports that the Google reps said they were proceeding “cautiously” with the introduction of new ad types (although images and video have appeared in sponsored links before). Regardless, you can be sure that more images and video will eventually make their way into the sponsored results of Google.com. It’s really just a question of when.

(Of course, video for AdSense has been available for well over a year.)

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Universal Search | Google: User Interface

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling