The Useful Ads Project: Independently Intelligent Ads
Scott Brinker
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
sbrinker@fas.harvard.edu
ABSTRACT
In this paper we examine ways to make Internet advertising
more useful to users. For the scope of this paper, we focus
exclusively on sponsored search ads served up when users
conduct queries on Google. Via a Firefox extension, we
enable users to access richer—and more independent—
information associated with an advertiser in the context of
that particular keyword search.
Author Keywords
Internet advertising, sponsored search.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
1. INTRODUCTION
The Internet has a love/hate relationship with advertising.
On one hand, advertising supports a tremendous number of
free services on the web—Google’s search engine, Gmail,
Google Maps, Facebook, and most online publishers.
Because advertisers pay for the opportunity to present their
messages to users of these services, users don’t have to
directly pay anything. It’s very similar to the model that
allowed broadcast radio and television to prosper.
However, the validity of this model is predicated on the
assumption that such advertising will prove beneficial to the
advertisers, that their messages will reach a reasonable
percentage of their target audience, and that such touch
points will positively contribute to the likelihood that a user
will eventually do business with the advertiser—or at least
spread the brand to their friends and colleagues when the
opportunity to influence a buying decision arises.
Unfortunately, this implied assumption of reciprocity from
users breaks down when you survey their sentiments of
advertising. It is not uncommon to hear users complain
Working draft, December 11, 2009
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Copyright © 2009 by Scott Brinker. All rights reserved.
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about their dislike for advertising and their intentions to
ignore it. Sometimes the opinions people have of online
advertising border on outright contempt. Certain advertising
formats in particular, such as gaudy, flashing banner ads
that take over a web page or pop-up windows that clutter a
user’s desktop, have infuriated people to the point that
AdBlock Plus, a Firefox extension that automatically blocks
all ads from a user’s browsing experience, has been
downloaded over 61 million times [1].
To a certain degree, sponsored search advertising—the
short text ads that appear at the top and to the right on a
search engine results page (SERP) on sites such as Google
Search, Bing, and Yahoo!—should fare better. The ads are
visually less intrusive and should have a higher degree of
relevance for users. After all, the users are looking for
something in particular (hence why they’re doing a search),
and advertisers are explicitly bidding on those keyword
search terms to signal that they have something of value in
that area.
Nonetheless, the bad sentiments that people have for online
advertising in general seem to spill over into sponsored
search as well. In the preliminary survey we conducted as
part of this project, 68.2% of the participants who identified
themselves as non-marketers (i.e., no professional bias
toward advertising) claimed that they never or rarely pay
attention to the ads when doing a search. Only a mere 4.5%
of non-marketers reported looking at the ads frequently,
more than 25% of the time.
This state of affairs seems unfortunate and inefficient for
everyone involved. Advertisers are not realizing the full
potential return on their investment, as a significant
percentage of users are shutting them out a priori. Users are
not connecting with advertisers who may very well have
valuable content to help them with the answers to their
search. It’s lose-lose situation.
In the big picture, if more and more users were to reject
advertising, eventually advertisers would learn to spend
their money elsewhere—putting the entire economic engine
of the web’s free services at risk of market failure. It’s only
a little bit of hyperbole to suggest that the future of the web
as we know it may depend on finding a solution to this
problem. It’s with that motivation in mind that we have
undertaken this project: how to make advertising more
useful to users.
For the scope of this paper, we focus solely on sponsored on organic search results, not sponsored ads, their work
search ads in Google. Through the use of a Firefox suggests that more expressive information about the search
extension, we explore layering additional information and ads may have a positive impact on the experience of users
options on the ads that users receive. Our intention, first and and their corresponding clickthrough rates.
foremost, is to help make those ads more useful to users—
An AdweekMedia/The Harris Poll of 2,521 U.S. adults in
with a secondary objective that if ads are more useful to
June 2009 to find out which ads are most helpful in making
users, and more successful at engaging them, then
purchase decisions [2]. While 37% of the respondents said
advertisers will benefit. However, since more information
that television ads were the most helpful, while only 17%
may not necessarily be beneficial to every advertiser in
said that about Internet search engine ads. (Only 1% of the
every situation, we place the needs of the user above the
respondents said that about Internet banner ads.)
needs of the advertiser in our approach.
Finally, Googlepedia, an extension for Firefox developed
The organization of this paper will be a description of
by James Hall, inserts relevant Wikipedia articles into the
related work, analysis of our survey of user sentiments for
search results pages on Google [10]. This mechanism of
sponsored search advertising, the description of our Firefox
dynamically altering pages on Google to deliver additional
extension design to address the issues arising from that
information to users is similar to what our Firefox extension
survey, and the results from a think-aloud study of
does. Because Googlepedia is an open source project, with
participants using this enhanced search advertising
permission granted by the author to use, modify and
extension. We conclude with several ideas of next steps to
redistribute his code, we used it as the starting point for our
build on this work.
extension.
2. RELATED WORK
3. SURVEY OF USER SENTIMENTS FOR SEARCH ADS
There are a number of papers that have explored the huge
As the first step of this project, we conducted a survey of
economic force that is sponsored search advertising, most
web users to learn more about their sentiments and
notably Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second
perceptions of sponsored search advertising today. Our
Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of
survey, performed on the web via SurveyMonkey.com, had
Keywords by Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz [7].
92 participants.
Gomes, Immorlica, and Markakis [8] argued that users
consider sponsored search ads using an “ordered search” Because requests for participation were posted on the
heuristic in Externalities in Keyword Auctions: An author’s blog and Twitter account, which has an audience
Empirical and Theoretical Assessment. However, there has of subscribers that include many marketers, the survey
been little academic research to date on when and how asked respondents to identify if they worked in marketing.
users decide to consider sponsored search ads at all, or how 52.2% (48) of the participants identified themselves as
those ads might be better from the user’s perspective. such, and since we expected their answers to be biased by
their professional experience, we segmented their responses
With banner advertising, there has been some interesting
in our analysis below. In the graphs presented, the orange
research in this area. Drèze and Hussherr noted users avoid
bars associated with “Yes” in the legend represent
looking at these ads in Internet Advertising: Is Anybody
marketers; the blue bars for “No” represent non-marketers.
Watching? (2003)—although they claim there is still brand
value with reach users at a pre-attentive level [6]. Jakob The first question asked respondents how often they pay
Nielsen, a well-regarded web usability expert, has attention to the sponsored ads when they do a search on
conducted eye-tracking studies to confirm this “banner Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.
blindness” [12]. However, Nielsen notes that the more
advertisements look like a native part of the site, the more
attention that receive. This bodes well for search ads in
Google, and indeed, eye-tracking studies by search
marketing firm Enquiro show that sponsored search ads do
get some attention—more than the banner ads in Nielsen’s
studies [11]. Danaher and Mullarkey (2003) found that user
in a goal-directed mode, such as search, are less likely to
recall banner ads [5].
Broder, et al., have described the benefits of “broad match”
insertion of sponsored search ads, considering ads related to
the user’s specific query, as a way to exposing users to
potentially more useful information from advertisers [3].
Clarke, et al., have shown that the features exposed in
search result summaries (“captions”) have an impact on the
clickthrough rate of users [4]. Although their research was

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68.2% of non-marketers responded that they rarely or never eager to provide this information with no strings attached,
look at the ads; only 4.5% of them said that they look at the as it helps nurture new potential customers and establishes a
ads frequently, at least 1-in-4 times when they do search favorable brand relationship between the advertiser and the
queries. Although asking people this question instead of prospect. From the user’s perspective though, it can still be
observing their actual behavior may not accurately reflect a source of useful, professional information.
exactly how much they pay attention to search ads in
However, the circumstances for an earlier-stage connection
practice, these answers do reveal their attitude towards
between advertisers and users are currently not ideal. We
these ads: generally they seek to avoid them.
asked respondents what the reasons are when they avoid the
Interestingly, marketers had a very different perspective on ads for a particular search. For non-marketers, they most
this question: 33.3% of them claimed to frequently pay frequently claimed that they don’t want to buy anything
attention to the ads. This may be due to their professional (54.5%), don’t think advertisers will have anything useful
responsibilities—examining their own ads and those of for them (50.0%), don’t find the information in the ads to
their competitors, as well as learning from the best practices be helpful (50.0%), or don’t trust the advertisers (40.9%).
of advertisers in other markets. However, it also raises the
possibility that marketers may believe that search ads are
more useful to their audience than is actually the case.
Since the first step in fixing a problem is recognizing it,
marketers should take careful note of this dichotomy.
To try to understand when people intentionally choose to
pay more attention to search ads—those rare times when
they do—the next question asked under what circumstances
they were more inclined to do so. 63.6% of non-marketers
(our primary group of interest) claimed that they pay more
attention when looking to buy something specific, what
marketers would typically consider to be late in the buying
cycle. However, the earlier you go back in the process, the
less likely those respondents were to consider advertising in
their search. 47.7% pay attention when researching a
category of products or services; 22.7% when learning
about a new idea or concept; and only 18.2% when trying to To address these concerns, especially when users aren’t in a
find answers to a specific problem. buying mode, there would need to be a way for users to
quickly see that an advertiser does have useful and relevant
knowledge and receive a signal of their trustworthiness.
The current format for sponsored search ads today is not
sufficient to communicate that information.
Finally, we asked respondents to pick the words that
describe how they feel about search ads, to tap into their
sentiments around ads and advertisers in this medium. (The
first step in solving a problem, after all, is recognizing it.)

These responses seem to reveal an opportunity: if ads could

help people in earlier stages of a search—in their quest for
answers, solutions, or new knowledge—that would make
ads more useful and relevant in a larger percentage of
search queries. We believe that this should be possible
because many advertisers are also experts in their domain,
and they have often invested significant effort in creating
content that can help prospects and customers in learning
about the pertinent subject matter. Advertisers are often

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 Screenshot 1: Google search results with our Firefox extension
Non-marketers overwhelmingly expressed negative feelings
about the ads: 60.5% found them annoying, 48.8% said they
were distracting, 44.2% saw them as untrustworthy, and
41.9% reported that they were uninformative.
Upon reviewing the results, we concluded that any solution
would have to address three issues:
• information: there needs to be a way to expose
the knowledge that an advertiser has to share with
the user that is relevant to their search earlier in the
buying cycle (so early that the user may not even
consider themselves in the buying cycle at all);
• objectivity: users have little trust for advertisers
by default, so additional information about the
advertiser and their relevant knowledge should be
communicated in a way that is independent of the
advertiser’s direct control;
• and integration: ideally, extra information about
the advertiser should be incorporated in a way that
is minimally disruptive to the user’s experience, so
as to not make ads any more distracting; rather,
such extensions should strive to make the ads more
useful in the search process—and therefore less
annoying.
4. FIREFOX EXTENSION, PRELIMINARY VERSION
As our first attempt at experimenting with more information
and objectivity in advertising, at least for sponsored search,
we developed a Firefox extension. This extension, called
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in2ads (for “independently intelligent advertising”), adds
two extra options to every ad—initially just for Google—a
“search” button and a “reviews” button.
The “search” button takes the search query that the user had
submitted to Google and reruns it with the search qualifier
“site:domain.com.” This takes advantage of an advanced
search feature offered by Google to limit the results of a
query to pages from a particular domain. In this case, we
use the root domain of the display URL shown near the
bottom of each ad. Because Google requires the root
domain of a display URL in an advertisement to match the
root domain of the ultimate destination that a user is
redirected to when they click on that ad, we can reasonably
assume that this is the most relevant domain on which to
search for more information about the advertiser.
For example, in the third ad shown in Screenshot 1 above
for the search on “software usability,” the display URL is
www.CatalystNYC.com. Therefore, catalystnyc.com would
be the root domain that we would use. In this example, the
query our extension would issue behind the scenes to
acquire more information about the advertiser would be
“software usability site:catalystnyc.com.”
We then take the results from this advertiser-specific search
and substitute the original organic results that are the main
body of the page. To distinguish these advertiser-specific
results, we shade the results area with a light green
background and attach a header that identifies them as
“results from <advertiser.com> only” as in Screenshot 2.
 Screenshot 2: Example of results from clicking the “Search” button associated with an ad

Screenshot 3: Example of results from clicking the "Reviews" button associated with an ad

At any point, the user can return to the original results by
clicking the corresponding “Search” button for that
advertiser a second time—when the advertiser-specific
results are show, the button is shaded to indicate that it is
depressed. Alternatively, the user can click a “[x] Close”
link on the far right of the header.
The rationale for this “Search” feature is two-fold. First,
substantive content that an advertiser has that is related to a
user’s search query could be helpful to users in learning
more about their subject of interest. Second, exposing the
depth and quality of the advertiser’s content related to that
search query may serve as an indication of that advertiser’s
suitability and level of expertise in that subject.

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The “Reviews” button functions in a similar fashion. In this
case, however, the extension generates a query for
“domain.com reviews” with the advertiser’s root domain.
This is a primitive heuristic to find reviews associated with
the advertiser, albeit independent of the particular subject.
Like the “search” feature, the results of this modified query
replace the primary results of the page. For reviews, the
results are instead shaded with a blue background and
labeled with a header bar that identifies them as “results for
<advertiser.com> reviews.”
For example, as shown in Screenshot 3, when the user
clicks on the “Reviews” button for the first ad, a query is
issued for “irise.com reviews.” In this example, the reviews
seem to contain particularly useful information, indicating
that iRise has had its applications reviewed by PC
Magazine and that it has been discussed as a possible
replacement for the well-known application Visio. This
lends credibility to iRise and helps the user understand a bit
more about their background and relevancy to the current
search.
To be sure, there are many dimensions in which we believe
this extension could be improved—including the use of user
sketches [13] to explore more options for getting the right
design before iterating on getting the design right. We will
explore some of these ideas later in this paper under the
section for future work.
However, as a first step for incorporating user feedback, we
conducted a “think aloud” study of this preliminary version
of the extension.
5. THINK ALOUD STUDY OF FIREFOX EXTENSION
We arranged for two participants, who we will call Andrew
and Bob, to participate in a think aloud study of our Firefox
extension. Both Andrew and Bob are friends of the author.
Andrew is a Ph.D. student in international public policy,
and Bob is a small business owner of a marketing services
firm.
Participants were told that they would be working with an
extension that would add a couple of new features to the
ads displayed in Google Search. However, they were not
told what those features would be, so that we could observe
their unprompted reactions and assumptions. They were
then asked to do a search for something of interest to them,
sharing their thoughts out loud throughout the session.
Andrew’s experience
Andrew was planning a trip to India over his winter break,
so he started with a query for “house rental Kerala” (Kerala
is a state in southwest India known for its tropical beaches).
A number of ads appeared on the top and right side of the
search results, and Andrew quickly noticed the new buttons.
The first ad was for karikkathibeachhouse.com, and he
clicked the “Reviews” button. The reviews layer appeared,
and Andrew seemed to naturally understand that the results
were a replacement of the previous organic listings. The
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third review was from tripadvisor.com, which he honed in
on because of a 4-out-of-5 star rating that was visible in the
summary for that result. “That’s useful,” he said, although
he did not click-through. He then clicked on the “Search”
button associated with the ad, but was disappointed when
no results were found.
Andrew then clicked on the “Search” button for several
other ads, trying to figure out what benefit it would offer
him. Only one of the four ads he chose had search results,
vacationhomerentals.com. “Hey, this web site actually has
stuff dealing with Kerala rentals.” Intrigued by several of
the results in this new search layer, he paused, “Should I
click the ad or one of these search links?” He decided to
click on the ad first, but when it took him to the site’s home
page, which was cluttered with content unrelated to Kerala,
he backed up and returned to the “Search” button results.
The first link in those results took him to a specific property
listing on the site, which made him visibly excited, “That
went somewhere useful.” He noted that as a candidate for
his trip.
Next, Andrew issued a new query for “Kerala houseboat”
(apparently a specialty of the region). The first ad was for
keralahouseboat.co.in, and again, he clicked the “Reviews”
button first. He remarked, “Trip Advisor has come up a few
times in these reviews. I honestly never would have thought
of checking reviews for these sites. But it’s actually useful
to know if these advertisers are for real, especially if I’m
going to count on them for a place to stay.”
Clicking the “Search” button for keralahouseboat.co.in, he
was pleased when seven results appeared, with the
summary of each providing more information about the
advertiser: company name is Grandeur Houseboat, formed
in 2003, over 11 houseboats, 50 trained professionals, fixed
menu offerings for food, honeymoon packages, description
of the “Kuttanad region” as the most interesting area in the
backwaters, and more. “It’s useful to see the results for your
query in the web site,” he said. However, he once again
expressed confusion about what to click: “It leaves me
wondering where the sponsored link is going to send me.
Should I click on a search result or on their ad?” He then
added, “It would be nice if I could explore these things
without losing my other results, maybe a fly-out sidebar or
another tab.”
Finally, he did a search for “flight in India,” where the first
ad was for makemytrip.com. Clicking the “Reviews” button
first again, he scrolled through the full page of review
results. “Oh, complaintsboard.com,” he said with a raised
eyebrow, clicking on the 10th result down. “I’ve used this
web site [makemytrip.com], but never looked at reviews
before,” he said while reading the complaints. “Seems
they’re not that great. Good to know.” He then paused and
said, “Problem is, I don’t know if I trust these reviews”—
scrolling back in the reviews—“such as reviewcentre.com,
who are they?” He then clicked on a review link for site
info from alexa.com, “Okay, I recognize these guys.”
At the end of the session, when asked for his impressions,
Andrew replied, “I found this useful. I didn’t realize that
there were so many reviews out there for web sites. It
would be nice if you could filter out the less useful
reviews—such as reviews from the web site itself—and
maybe order the ads according to that information.”
Bob’s experience
Bob seemed a little less comfortable being observed at first.
He started by doing a search for “cheap eyeglasses,” and
immediately honed in on the “Reviews” button. “I don’t
know what ‘Search’ means, but ‘Reviews’ makes a lot of
sense.” He checked the reviews for several advertisers, but
then remarked that the reviews seemed “kind of random.”
He then switched to several work-related searches that he
had done recently, including “ruby on rails development
house Boston” and “web and email hosting Mac IMAP.” In
all of these he favored clicking the “Reviews” button, but
he was reluctant to click through on any of the subsequent
results, muttering, “So I’d have to click on a review and
then come back? I really hate clicking the back button.” He
finally clicked on a reviews link for 10besthosts.com, where
he was happy to find an entry with 108 reviews. “That’s
good,” he noted. He tried the “Search” button a couple of
times, but was disappointed with few results. (We note that
his search queries here were quite long and specific.)
Jumping around again, he searched for “space shuttle
challenger stamps,” but no ads appeared. He now seemed
bent on using this tool to try to find rare items via ads, and
immediately executed a new search for “car coffee maker.”
A number of ads appeared for this term, and suddenly Bob
burst out, “I hate to click on anything on the right.” He
angrily shook his finger at the ads in the right rail off the
page. “Really hard to read, they all look the same.” Turning
his attention to the first ad at the top of the page, for
smarthome.com, he again clicked the “Reviews” button—
but only briefly glance through the list. “If one of these said
something about the quantity of reviews, that would be
helpful.” He then clicked on the smarthome.com ad, only to
be presented with a big announcement on the landing page
that the product was discontinued. Exasperated, he scanned
the other ads, but since they were all talking about coffee
makers and not specifically coffee makers for your car, he
pushed his chair back from the computer, giving up.
However, before we could intervene, he exclaimed, “I
know what I want!” He moved back to the keyboard and
typed in “Kenneth Cole Tflex.” Explaining as he went, he
said “I love these shoes, but I can’t get them from Kenneth
Cole anymore. Maybe I can find a reseller who might have
leftover stock.” Since kennethcole.com came up as the first
ad, he clicked on the “Search” button—and was surprised to
find a large set of results for his desired T-Flex shoes. “I see
the T-Flex is back… but do I click on these new results, or
should I click on the ad?” After a pause, he commented,
“As a consumer, I’m sick of having too many choices.”
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That thought triggered a flood of feedback from Bob. “I
think having this utility reduces my propensity to actually
click on the ad. I think this is slowing me down. Maybe it
would be better if these results were non-clickable. I like it
providing me an additional inside look into the site before I
click. But I’m sick of this whole long list format from
Google anyway, this list of ten items—blue, black, green.”
He poked his finger at the blue headline, black two-line
summary, and green URL of each search result. “This
hasn’t changed in like 15 years. There’s got to be a better
way.”
Turning back to the reviews feature, he said, “Not sure that
these reviews—I can’t quickly see, right there, well, what
are the ratings or reviews. I don’t want links to ratings and
reviews. I want to see stars. And I want to see number of
reviews. And it would be nice to sort reviews by time or by
what other people found useful. I’m just not getting the
reviews from the list. I need something more visual that I
can get just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Like the
reviews on the Apple Store.”
He also suggested, “What about rating the ad itself? X
number of people found this ad and what came after it
useful.”
Post-script to think aloud study
In retrospect, the format of this study did not encourage
participants to interact with the ads in situations other than
immediate purchase considerations. Instead, by mentioning
that we were adding new features to the ads, and asking the
participants to do searches that were meaningful to them,
they naturally searched for things for which they expected
to be interested in the advertising.
Nonetheless, the feedback of these participants was helpful
in revealing some of the frustrations experienced with ads
in that context. Their frequent choice to click on the
“Reviews” button—and even their disappointment when it
didn’t provide them with exactly what they where hoping
for—demonstrated a yearning for better ways to evaluate
advertisers and their respective offers.
In this context, it makes sense that reviews would generally
be more valuable than additional informational searches.
Users have largely made up their mind about what they
want, and now they simply want to determine the best place
to buy it. A separate study will be needed to explore earlier
stage searches and observe how users might consider using
extended “independently intelligent advertising” to help
achieve their objectives in that context.
6. FUTURE WORK
This first incarnation of our extension for “independently
intelligent advertising” is admittedly quite primitive. But
based on the results of our survey of user sentiments and
the encouraging experiences of our think aloud study, we
believe there is an opportunity to further develop this
technology in ways that can make advertising more useful.
Even Bob, who didn’t particularly like the current
implementation, was hungry for better information about
the advertisers—at least in the context of certain searches.
Here we present some of our ideas for future development
of the in2ads extension and related services:
Visually, the experience could certainly be improved. For
instance, the current “Search” and “Review” buttons could
be replaced with icons. These icons could be smaller,
probably outlined, so as to have less visual weight and
minimize distraction. By default they could be lightly
tinted, and then pop with greater saturation when the user
hovers over them. Results could be organized into new tabs
within the page, to make it easier to distinguish the new
results from the original organic results.
Just as thumbnail previews of pages in organic search
results have been shown to improve web search [14], we
believe that providing such preview images for the ads—
and the additional results delivered by our extension—can
help a user make better judgments about them. These
preview screenshots could be made available when the user
hovers over or clicks a preview page icon. This will give
them a sense of the relevancy and quality of an advertiser’s
page before actually clicking through. We believe this may
also help resolve questions about what to click on—the ad
itself, or links on the additional search results delivered by
our extension.
The additional content exposed through this extension
could certainly benefit from better information extraction
behind the scenes. The “Search” feature could preload
queries, speeding up responsiveness when a user clicks on
one and dimming out if none are available—or displaying
the number of results with a graphic or numeric indicator.
The results could be filtered or grouped to categorize the
most useful ones—perhaps highlighting key facts. It might
be helpful to triangulate search results from multiple
engines as well, including Yahoo! and Bing. If there is a
site map associated with the advertiser’s site, it may be
useful to organize results visually within that structure.
Similarly, reviews could benefit from more intelligent and
sophisticated parsing—perhaps running queries for “good”
and “bad” reviews or performing sentiment analysis on the
results. As Bob suggested, it would be helpful if reviews
information could be aggregated and organized in a more
cohesive manner. Perhaps we could bubble this information
up into each ad’s icons as a quick visual cue of an
advertiser’s reputation. Searches could also be performed
across social media and networking sites, such as Facebook,
LinkedIn, and Twitter, to uncover related commentary from
a user’s virtual circle of friends and colleagues.
Perhaps the information displayed could morph depending
on the mode the user is in: initial research or exploratory
searches could provide more informational services, while
later-stage purchase-oriented searches could emphasize
more review services.
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Other third-party content that may prove useful could
include inbound links to the advertiser’s domain, Alexa and
Compete traffic rankings, data about the registration of the
domain, the advertiser’s PageRank, etc.
An advantage of all of the features described above is that
they do not require any centralized service for the extension
itself. This makes such an extension inherently scalable—as
many people can use it as they want, without any additional
infrastructure. It also minimizes any privacy concerns, as
there is no centralized service tracking their interactions
around the ads.
However, if we were to consider a centralized service, a
whole new set of capabilities could be developed to support
user ratings and reviews. One option could be an explicit
feedback mechanism, such as thumbs up or thumbs down
buttons that the user could click associated with the ad or
on the subsequent advertiser’s site. Alternatively, the
service could automatically track which ads users click on
and how long they stay on the advertiser’s site as a way of
inferring the relevancy and usefulness of the ad in that
context.
Of course, the extension should be expanded to operate in a
similar fashion with ads on Yahoo! and Bing. Ultimately, it
may also be applicable in other online advertising vehicles,
such as Facebook ads or, more broadly, display advertising
on any web site. The extension could be ported to other web
browsers, such as Chrome and Internet Explorer. And
languages other than English, and geographies other than
the United States, should also be supported.
With all of these ideas, significant future work will be
required to study their impact on users—do these features,
or variations thereof, help improve their experience on the
web? Does it make advertising more useful to them? Does
it help them trust some advertisers, at least those who seem
worthy? And from the advertiser’s perspective, what will be
the impact of users adopting these features?
While further laboratory studies may help answer some of
these questions, we believe there is also an opportunity to
use the easy distribution of Firefox extensions to conduct
large-scale in situ studies.
7. CONCLUSION
Online advertising can be qualitatively different than any
other advertising medium that’s come before. There is no
reason to restrict the possibilities of how users interact with
ads to the modes previously used by traditional media or
direct response. Instead, we have the opportunity to think
up new paradigms that natively take advantage of the
distributed, collective intelligence available through the
Internet. Combined with agent software that works in real-
time on behalf of the user, online advertising has the
potential to be transformed from an annoyance to a useful
service in the eyes of its audience—not just the advertisers.
We believe that the ideas presented in this paper, if adopted
at a large enough scale, could create the right incentives for
advertisers to compete via the utility they provide to users
earlier in the search process. It could encourage advertisers
to invest more effort in good content and good search
engine optimization (SEO) practices to make that content
more accessible to extensions such as ours. And by
elevating the visibility of review sites, it could hopefully
inspire more contributions from the community and
motivate more responsiveness to issues raised there from
the advertisers being reviewed.
Ambitiously, we envision a virtuous cycle, by which ads
become the markers for more useful information—and a
signal of more trustworthiness of the advertisers behind
them.
During this project, we received some feedback that search
engines such as Google might be best suited to provide
these features. That may be true for this initial
implementation, but many of the features envisioned for the
future would span across search engines and advertising
networks. Furthermore, we believe that these capabilities
benefit from being independent of both the advertisers and
the publishers selling the ad space, such as Google.
However, there is no reason to believe that this broader
mission of making Internet advertising more useful need be
limited to a single solution. The more people working on
this issue, the more likely we are to breakthrough to the
next level of advertising—and Internet—history.
Breaking news from Google
Near the end of this project, Google announced a series of
new search ad formats, such as ads with video trailers, ads
with integrated maps, ads with product photos, and ads that
can be associated with others in its category for price and
rate comparisons [9]. In their announcement, Google
frames these new ads as a way to provide better information
to users. “As we continue to think up innovative ways to
give you the information you want, you’re likely to see
even more ad formats until we pinpoint the most useful,
relevant and engaging ones.” Their motivation to make ads
more useful serves as validation that this is an important
dimension on which to focus attention. However, while we
laud Google’s stated intent, we remain intrigued by ideas
that address usefulness outside of the direct control of the
advertiser, as a way to provide more objective (i.e.,
trustworthy) information to users.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Krzysztof Gajos, Ece Kamar, and the students of
the Fall 2009 CS279r class on intelligent interactive
systems at Harvard University for their suggestions and
feedback on this project.
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