John Battelle has posted a screen capture from a presentation given by Gary Flake of Microsoft showing a new approach to search ads. The search ads on the Live.com search results have a little icon next to them, when you mouse over those icons, up comes a larger image or flash or interactive based ad.

When will this come to a search results page near you? I do not know but how will this impact one’s click through rate and conversions – that is the big question.

This implementation kind of reminds me of Ask.com’s Binoculars but is a lot less useful and a lot more annoying.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Microsoft: General

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn