Google Hotel Price Ads: A Preview of What's to Come in Flight Search?

Mike Blumenthal’s blog flags Google’s move to place its hotel booking feature to the front of search results. The feature, first tested back in November, appears to be getting a wider roll out.

Now, users who search for hotels in say New York or San Francisco are treated to an entire screen full of – you guessed it – ads. Instead of seeing natural or organic search results listed in order of relevance, users see a page of ads and there’s no way to know how Google determines the order of the paid advertisements. Is it the hotel in San Francisco that gets the most traffic and most user reviews? Or the highest paying advertiser?

More on Google’s hotel ad “experiment” here.

A preview of what’s to come when Google rolls out flight search?