>you are all whining about: the organic results have icons and the ad says "Ad" instead.

You're being condescending but appear to have missed the point. The "Ad" text in Google's results is in the exact same position and is effectively the same pixel dimensions as the favicon.

It's cleverly designed and placed to resemble a favicon, to give the over-all layout more uniformity between ads and organic results.

As a user, I want less uniformity between ads and organic results, not more.

DDG is hiding the "Ad" label on their shopping carousel, with unreadable #888 light grey text. That part is worse than Google's darker #666 (and longer word) "Sponsored".

The screenshot doesn't show any Ad links in the text list results (unless the ads are wholly unlabeled).

It's not really the same case as the OP.

You're right, good catch.

One could argue the words surrounding the carousel on DGG ("Shopping" and "Ad") are slightly more transparent than Google's "Sponsored" heading, but that's splitting hairs I guess.

In either case, I find both carousels pretty obvious in their intent. Maybe it's because the prices are being shown? I think more sophisticated internet users are trained to know that when you see a $xx.xx price on the internet, along with a link to purchase the item, there's probably some kind of commercial relationship happening behind the scenes.

These days, whenever I see a product mentioned anywhere on the web with links to purchase it, I default to assuming it's an affiliate link.

I never noticed that. Perhaps because Google has trained me to ignore anything in the carousel.

Well.. the DuckDuckGo and Google implementations are a little different but on both sites the ads are designed to blend into the organic results. If we weren't talking about the icon we could talk about the background colour, font, text colour, layout, URL in green etc. I don't begrudge DuckDuckGo, they have a very large competitor on their hands and wish them a lot of luck.

Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.

But notice how the "Ad" text is specifically formatted (and placed) to resemble a favicon? They're blatantly trying to make the ads and organic results appear uniform to someone quickly scanning the page.

As a user, I want the ads more easily distinguishable, not less.

100% - it's a dark pattern and you know exactly why they're doing it: cash money from advertisers.

The internet is slowly being turned into a corporate power grab and it's only getting worse YOY =|

Fortunately in french "Annonce" is longer than "Ad" and doesn't look like a favicon ! Maybe they will change it to "Pub".

This trick is what caused me to click and Ad for the first time in forever. If the icons happen to be dark its easy to ignore the 'Ad' text. Maybe its time to supply a complaint. I doubt this is legal in Sweden.

Yes I see the same, it's really easy to tell what is an ad and what isn't...

The distinction between the two has certainly gone down though (by quite a bit IMO). This feels like boiling a frog.

I guess it depends on the user. I can't really put myself in the mindset of someone else, but I am pretty sure I would never accidentally click an ad and not realize it. Maybe others who don't pay attention to this kind of thing might be affected though.

Agree, ads seem clearer than ever to me, the big bold "Ad" is more distinct to me than the previous treatment.

To me, the clearest Google ads had colored background and text "Sponsored Link" on the side.