I knew that one day Google would not be able to resist the urge to tamper with what had been hitherto a nearly fool-proof method of making advertising work well for their search engine. Now it would seem that they have gone down the path of the dark side already and are following right in AOL's footsteps with flashy, graphical advertising on their main search engine:

Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics.

And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations.

They've been offering graphical advertisements for quite some time for their Adsense users, but that was because it could make sense for many of their Adsense users to allow graphical ads to be displayed on their websites. Personally, I like to keep my blog very sparse on the graphics to make it easier for a wider variety of devices to display comfortably and I'm not too happy with the gaudy, graphically-intensive look of many blogs. That said, this move, while not immediately disasterous, could be the beginning of the end for Google's big lead in search because it will distract from their original formula which was based around the concept of search results first, targetted ads second and integrated conveniently among the search results in a way that wasn't intrusive. Flashy ads are often very intrusive to the casual user.

I've been wondering lately if Google is going to really make it in the long run. Their business model is built disproportionately off of advertising and the online market for ads has crashed in the past pretty badly. If they cannot build up their search device revenues to the point where they can survive on just the sales of their search device products, I wonder if they will be able to survive the eventual next blow to online advertising. Let's also not forget the fact that Microsoft is still doing extremely well in their core markets and has the capital to hire the best talent out there when it comes down to a matter of buying the best talent.

If I were in charge of Microsoft at this point, I'd be making peace with Firefox, Apache and other open source web products and would be actively moving into to push Google into the online sea by genuinely open sourcing Microsoft's search products and building a community around them. There is no reason why Microsoft couldn't do this since the dual-license business model has worked fairly well for MySQL. It might not generate several billion dollars a year for Microsoft, but if it brings Google to their knees and protects Microsoft's core assets and prevents them from moving easily into markets like the mobile computing market that Microsoft wants, it's a sacrifice that will easily pay for itself and then some.