Last night I heard a commercial for Honda, where it told the audience to go to Yahoo and search for “shop honda.” I, being an obedient TV viewer, did as instructed and searched for shop honda and saw this ad:

The ad is labeled “Partner Results” and seems to be one of those special partner relationships Yahoo has with some companies.

Remember a while back we reported about Yahoo Shortcuts For Sale? A search for ‘special k’ on Yahoo returned a listing that looked like this:

We were a bit upset that the ad wasn’t fully labeled as so. Yahoo told us it wasn’t necessarily an ad, but a partnership program they had with some companies. Since then, I forgot about it until the Honda commercial. If you take a second look at the special k search at Yahoo, it now is clearly labeled, like the ‘shop honda’ example above.

When I click on the “partner results” tag, at the upper right corner of the ad, I am taken to a page on Where are sponsor results shown on the Search results page? The page doesn’t give too many details or any details on these special partner results or how any advertiser can obtain them.

In any event, Google also went under the magnifying glass when they placed graphical ads on their search page for the special Bourne Ultimatum video ads, which are now labeled “Google Promotion.” Oh, the Yahoo Special K ad is also a video ad, so expect to see many more video ads in place of text ads on the search results pages.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Search Ads

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