October 9th, 2008
Google Adds AdSense to Maps
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Is Google taking a shotgun approach to the economic downturn? First they announce Click-to-Buy links on YouTube videos, then AdSense for Games, and now it appears that even Google Maps aren’t untouched by AdSense.
If you look above, for example (click to enlarge), you can see that there is an ad at the bottom of the map created for the query “San Francisco hotels.” It’s advertising Holiday Inn (makes sense).
Search for “San Jose pizza,” and you get a similar result.
It would be nice if Google could put pushpins of a different shade or color on the map to highlight the Holiday Inns, for example. Oh, wait, they did (see below, click to enlarge). But it’s unrelated to the link under the map. While there were sponsored links for Holiday Inns, there’s that one I have open, for the Hotel Whitcomb.
Why not, though? comScore says 131 million unique visitors worldwide used Google Maps in August for a total of 1.3 billion pageviews.
Where will we see AdSense show up next? I’m wondering if they might expand into the space above urinals. 
How about IN urinals, where they belong!!!!! says:
Brought to you by I hate Google!
(the next Micro$oft!)
October 10th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
LZW says:
The secret is out of the bag… Google started as an internet search site but that was just a devious ploy for their hidden agenda, to be an advertising agency!
I don’t know why they even bother with search any more? Their claim to fame about indexing the more of the internet then anyone else is total BS!
Take “pizza” for example… A google search claims 210,000,000 results for pizza but if you start clicking through them, 967 is the LAST result! Therefore, those millions of results are all LIES!!! Here is the link to prove it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza&hl=en&start=990&sa=N
The one good thing about google is at least they fixed adsense/adwords so they don’t screw up web pages any more… Like you can see on Alice’s blog here, the “ads by google” are isolated to the right side of the page content. When google started puttings ads on nearly every web page, they overlapped the page content on the right, rendering any page that had hyperlinks on the right side as unusable! There simply was no way to click the links under the google ads and navigate the site.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Cash Master says:
Google AdSense is everywhere! I did a quick news search on AdSense and not only are the ads on maps but they are going to start adding them to games!
October 12th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Peter says:
Google AdSense why not I wish I had the idea and get the money for the fees now. As long as it stays where it is no problem. In regards of Holiday Inn I think it is fantastic that IHG has done the step you even can download a little program for Google earth adding the exact locations of the hotels on the Google maps. Well done IHG. In this competitive market new ideas are needed and only the once using the tools available will succeed.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:22 pm