I had an interesting search experience today. I typically rely on a browser’s dedicated search box instead of actually navigating to a search engine’s homepage. Today, I went to google.com and started searching for chrome extensions. I was surprised when the top result in the auto-suggest popped up with the usual blue text and URL you see in an AdWords ad. It’s hard to tell if that’s really an ad, since that link is to a legit Google site focused on exploiting Chrome’s V8 Javascript VM for some interesting use cases.

Is this the direction Google is taking, mixing ads and search results where users have experienced strictly search results? It’s certainly one way to drive up CTR, but at what expense to the user experience? I’m curious to see if this is a widely deployed “feature” or something that is being tested across a limited number of searched. It was definitely a turn off for me.  Some experimenting shows me that it’s kind of like a “I’m feeling lucky” hit for a specific URL that matches the search query. If so, their choice of presentation is unfortunate.