Someone on Digg noticed that Google has decorated the divider between organic search results and ads with a candy-cane graphic, when you search for certain Christmas-related keywords. I've seen the decoration on the results page for christmas and candy cane. It doesn't work for misteltoe or santa claus. The graphic really draws one's eyes to the Sponsored Links column—that's got to be good for advertisers. Why not put some effort into this, do it all the time, and create graphic dividers that relate to all kinds of keywords?
1. Because doing it all the time is as effective as doing it none of the time.
Your eye is drawn to it because its new. If it were there all the time, you'd ignore it just as much as you ignore banner ads.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Dissent