Is this a Google bug?

As search evangelists we practice what we preach here at Found. Our typical weapon of choice when searching is Google although, in an attempt to remain impartial we will throw the odd query to Yahoo! and NineMSN/Live. You can imagine our surprise when we found these results for a search for “child care” after searching for “car insurance” in Google today:

It appears that Google is heavily applying some kind of personalisation script or filter to the way concurrent results are being matched. This seems to be leading to a “residual” matching effect taking place for PPC ads as evidenced by the ads for AAMI Car Insurance, Just Car Insurance etc indicated in the screenshot. These ads were completely relevant for the previous search of “car insurance” but are completely irrelevant to a subsequent search for “child care”. Google has even combined the intent of the car insurance and child care queries and thrown in an ad for “childrens life insurance”. When the results first occurred we thought causes could be attributed to:

• Personalisation as has been previously covered here but the screen snap above came from non-personalised seemingly IP-based results (ie we were not signed in to a Google account). If these results are being personalised it could signal a significant push to personalise results for all users based on browser IP/or a cookie. The complete lack of relevance of a number of the results to the search term, however, will make it a very tough sell to argue the results have been effectively targetted.
• We also thought the results could be isolated to our IP but a few quick searches by other people on different IPs produced similarly confusing results. The screen shot below for “blinds Melbourne” came from a friend on a different IP.

We then thought that perhaps the results could be isolated to Australia but a quick search for “health insurance” and then “texas car rental” on google.com via a proxy produced the results below:

If these results are occurring for users across the board it raises a number of questions about the effect these new personalised results could be having on PPC accounts such as:

• Are the impressions being counted?
• If they are being counted you would imagine the CTR would be a lot lower than regularly targetted searches due to the complete lack of relevance – how is this affecting advertisers quality score?
• If the ads do get clicked are advertisers being charged for irrelevant traffic? Are advertisers seeing an impact on conversion rates from traffic that is less obviously relevant?
• If the landing pages of the irrelevant ads are being crawled by Google’s landing page quality spiders will the lack of matched content be impacting the campaign quality score, therefore pricing?

The results are concerning for both advertisers and users alike. There are still a number of experiments to be done to establish when and where these results will occur. It would also be interesting to hear from Google how the personalised results are being treated for PPC clients. We’ll keep you posted on any impacts on our PPC client’s campaigns.