To address user frustration with search results cluttered by ads, Google is rolling out a significant design change that groups all its advertisements into a single section labeled “Sponsored results,” rather than displaying individual headings for each link. A label will follow the user down the page as they scroll to clearly mark where the paid content ends.
The New ‘Hide’ Control
Crucially, once a user has scrolled through the ad section, a new button labeled “Hide sponsored results” appears. This button allows users to collapse the entire block of text ads from the top of the page. The ads can be quickly restored if the user clicks the button again, a feature that may be useful if a user determines one of the sponsored results offers the best solution for their search.
Google says these changes, including the button to hide paid results, will be rolling out gradually to all users soon. Omkar Muralidharan, VP of Product Management and Data Science at Google Ads, stated that, in the company’s testing, “the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily.” The redesign keeps the size of the ads the same, ensuring the user will “still never see more than four text ads in a grouping.”
Transparency and Search Evolution
This consolidated labeling extends to all elements that are paid for on the page, such as the Shopping carousel, which will now be clearly labeled as “Sponsored products.” This follows Google’s 2022 policy change to replace the simpler “Ad” wording with the more explicit “Sponsored” tag to clarify the nature of paid placements.
The introduction of this new ad control comes as Google’s search results pages have become increasingly complex. The results are now busier due to the introduction of AI Overviews (AI-generated summaries that appear above web links), a feature that has already changed user behavior. Research from July suggested that over a quarter of Google searches now conclude with the user clicking on the AI Overview, signaling a fundamental shift in how people consume search information.
What The Author Thinks
Microsoft’s move to make cloud saving the default in Word, while framed as a beneficial feature against data loss, is fundamentally a crucial strategic step to enforce user lock-in and solidify OneDrive as the mandatory foundation for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By making document saving seamless, the company simultaneously ensures that user data is available for future monetization through AI services like CoPilot, effectively making the convenience of auto-save inseparable from the necessity of cloud storage. This change is a clear indicator that the value of productivity software now lies not in the application itself, but in the proprietary data it channels into the cloud.
Featured image credit: Benjamin Dada via Unsplash
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