Reuters broke the news first. Apparently, Nick Fox, a Google director of product management, told investors that Google would soon apply aspects of its organic universal search technology to its commercial listings. This could include the inclusion of YouTube video clips within results pages.

Here is what Fox had to say:

An area weve recently increased our level of investment in is new ad formats. Our search ads have largely looked the same over the course of the past seven or eight or nine yearsbut weve seen that users respond very well to seeing results in a format that is appropriate to the information theyre looking for. Now were looking at applying the same philosophy to our search ads as well.

Fox mentioned a couple of advertisers that are having success already with video ads. This includes the forthcoming movie Fame and this is what its ad looks like:

In an effort to make more money from this advertising, Fox said that Google can charge advertisers a fee when a user plays a video.

In August, Google introduced a feature to search ads which allows advertisers to highlight multiple links to different products or brands within the ad and they are looking at something similar for maps which will no doubt interest local advertisers.

Do you have any further suggestions on how Google can jazz up their search ads? If so, feel free to share them below.

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