Google shakes AdWords snowglobe again

Add ads to Google News, shutters mobile biz pages service

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 26th February 2009 13:37 GMT

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Google has added its AdWords program to the company’s News searches in the US and quietly ditched its Adwords business pages for mobile ads service.

Mountain View confirmed that it is now delivering text ads on the right side of the search results page on its Google News site in much the same way as it has done for normal web search results.

“In recent months we've been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP,” said Google’s biz product manager Josh Cohen on the company’s blog.

“We've always said that we'd unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we'll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too.”

This is Google’s latest attempt to milk the cash cow in the face of a weakened economy. It recently added ads in Google Finance and Google Earth.

Meanwhile, the search giant has offloaded its AdWords business pages for mobile ads, which is a service for adverts displayed on the low-end WAP mobile technology market.

According to reports Google said take up of the service among businesses had been sluggish. Google has told users it would "retire" the service on 23 March.

Just last month Google dumped its two-year-old Print Ads program because it had failed to live up to expectations.

The world's largest text-ad broker had originally hoped that Print Ads would bring the company’s automated method of selling ads through auctions to dead tree news proprietors. ®

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