Microsoft Thinking Of Testing Mouse Over Image Ads In Live.com Search Results

May 11, 2007 at 11:33am ET by Barry Schwartz

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.

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.

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