Dennis Woodside of Google has some simple advice for travel marketers who will have to try to cope with the coming disruption — “dog-fooding.”

In his keynote address at TravelCom in Dallas, Woodside, Google’s vice president of American operations, says travel companies will have to eat their own dog feed — i.e. constantly test and tweak the solutions they’ve created — as they meet head-on looming disruptions in search, video, mobile and cloud computing.

Search: Woodside says search will have to become richer, more social and global as consumers seek user-generated content and video about their travel experiences.

“The way you think of search has to evolve,” Woodside says.

Video: Woodside says video will evolve into a more flexible advertising mode as half of all video will be addressable to certain consumers or segments instead of the current 30-second spot with a one-size fits all approach.

For example, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority would be able to make inroads by advertising on the Web certain racy shows or attractions out in the desert in a more cost-effective way than is done today, he says.

Travel marketers would be able to reach much larger audiences with video at various price points than is the current norm today, Woodside says.

Mobile: In the long term, some 30% of online bookings will come from mobile devices, Woodside says.

In fact, he argues, “we think it [mobile] will become more important than the PC.”

Even Google feels a threat from mobile, Woodside says, and it will have to adapt all of its services for mobile or become “less relevant.”

Cloud computing: Most travel marketers will have to migrate their services to cloud computing, which will be another disruptive force, Woodside says.

So, hold onto your hats, break out your smartphone and pass the dog food.

In a move likely to reignite the ongoing debate about Google’s influence over the travel industry, engineers have the sector back on their radars as they launch another AdWords Comparison Ads trial.

The extension of the Google Comparison Ads pilot to the UK announced yesterday will see a new vertical tested by the search giant: credit cards.

Comparison Ads is effectively a metasearch (or price comparison, using the Cheapflights parlance) of products already in the AdWords system.

It looks and feels like a scaled-down Kayak in terms of functionality.

Trialled for the first time in some selected states in the US with mortgages in October 2009, credit card firms will be the next sector taken on board to test pricing, interest from suppliers, functionality and user behaviour.

Google is inevitably and officially remaining tight-lipped as to how, where and when it might extend the project further.

Even back in December 2009, representatives were playing down any idea that Comparison Ads would be extended.

Fast forward two months and unofficially from within the mothership travel is now acknowledged as an obvious sector to consider for a trial given the quantity of ads in the system, size of the marketplace and the engine’s starting point for many travel consumers.

As noted previously, Comparison Ads as a concept throws up a multitude of issues for Google and advertisers alike:

• PPC ad copywriting
• Product feeds
• Google client servicing
• Product sourcing
• Feed reliability
• Placement within Google real estate
• AdSense extension

Some folk in Connecticut, US, will be scratching their heads as feverishly as they are digging their way through the snow this weekend after Google named the metasearch firm Kayak on its list of competitors.

The Norwalk, CT-based company was named in Google’s 2009 Annual Report – filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 12 2010 – alongside the likes of Monster, eBay and Amazon.

This is the first time that Google has named vertical search companies as competitors, normally only reserving such flattery for software and search companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

The Annual Report says:

“Our business is characterized by rapid change and converging, as well as new and disruptive, technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising.”

It then goes on to list:

• Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
• Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their websites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
• Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter.

Further on in the report, Google says competition will have a long-lasting effect.

“We believe our revenue growth rate will generally decline as a result of a number of factors including increasing competition, the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels, and the increasing maturity of the online advertising market.”

When asked about being cited as a competitor, Kayak chief marketing officer Robert Birge says the company has a “great relationship” with Google as an advertising medium, but adds humbly:

“I’m a bit surprised that we would be called out given our size (I’m pretty sure that Google has a bigger janitorial staff in their NY offices than our 97 employees) and given that using the much larger OTAs are also a substitute behavior for using a search engine.”

Tnooz posted the following question on Twitter:

“Imagine you were cited as a competitor by Google. Would you be a) flattered b) terrified c) start prepping those sale documents?”

One public response from Sunshine.co.uk boss Chris Clarkson and a handful via DM said simply: all of the above.

There is so much focus on Google and Apple in the mobile phone market that it may come as a surprise to hear that Yahoo is the tech firm knocking on the door of the patent office.

The company has this week filed a new application at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia.

The technology, developed by Sorren Riise and Devesh Patel in the UK, works firstly by understanding via the handset which direction a user is travelling.

Normally when a user types in a query into a search engine the advertising placed alongside the search results is dependent on what the user has search for and/or geographic loction.

However, the recently created technology serves advertising based on the direction the user is heading and making a judgement on where they are likely to be going.

For example:

User leaves London on the Eurostar to Paris. Rather than serve UK-based advertising during the first part of the journey, the technology will detect what the user is doing and where they are going in order to serve Paris-based ads.

The full patent abstract:

“A system is described for providing location predictive advertising. The system may include a processor, a memory, and an interface. The memory may store an advertisement. The interface may communicate with an electronic device.

“The processor may determine a first geographic location of an electronic device which is travelling in a direction. The processor may identify a first geographic region which may encompass the first geographic location of the electronic device. The processor may determine a second geographic region which is located in the direction of travel of the electronic device.

“The processor may determine an advertisement associated with the second geographic region in accordance with the electronic device being located within the first geographic region. The processor may provide the advertisement to the electronic device.”

Company-employee disputes are not like they used to be – if the latest spat between British Airways and a union representing cabin crews are anything to go by.

The long-running face-off between BA and Unite has gone from being ugly to downright vitriolic as Twitter accounts are launched to spread their message through social media.

Unite has already created a video for YouTube outlining its position against the company, but the use of Twitter marks an new approach and is aimed at building support from the flying public.

The airline is battling cabin crew over changes to working conditions, pay and job cuts, but its ill-fated and hugely unpopular strike action planned for the Christmas period in 2009 is widely believed to have damaged its campaign.

A Twitter account [@amicuscabincrew] launched late last year charted events and procedures for members leading up to the first strike ballot and into 2009.

The second account, under the name @unitebaupdates is far more opinion-led and tracks mentions in the mainstream media as well as using services such as Twitpic to poke fun at BA.

Neither account has thousands of followers but posts are presumably being created to appear in live search results within Google and Bing and on Twitter Search for British Airways/BA.

This week the union balloted members over strike plans for March 2009 after promising not to disrupt the Easter Holiday period.

User review giant TripAdvisor will have a few worries on its mind if Google follows through on its threat to pull out of China following a row over cyber attacks on government protestors.

Tnooz has learned the TripAdvisor-DaoDao business in China currently gets around a third of all its search engine traffic just from Google.

Google has threatened to reverse its previous decision to block sites and information banned by the Chinese government, a move which effectively could lead Google.cn being blocked at the touch of a button.

TripAdvisor general manager in China, Hao Wu, says the company is watching developments closely but has no sense at this stage which way the row is likely to go.

The Expedia-owned business was always going to be one of the big travel sites under threat as it relies to heavily on and performs well in natural search through Google.

Wu says:

“If Google is able to redirect Google.cn users and advertisers to Google.com and Google.com’s access is not noticeably impacted, then the immediate impact to our biz would be minimal.

“In the long term, if Google completely retreats from China, then it’d be worrisome for us in China since our SEM cost will likely go up as Baidu dominates the market.”

Another “key component”, Wu explains, is TripAdvisor’s use of Google Maps across much of the hotel pages on the site .

TripAdvisor officially launched DaoDao (Chinese variation of the brand) in April 2009 following a six-month beta test in the country.

The division has grown far quicker than other TripAdvisor country brands  around the world (around 50 employees) due to the complex nature of the business and protocols.

Wu says there are a number of options in the long term, including using over search players such Sohu and Ten Cent QQ, but both sites are too small to challenge Baidu, the country’s biggest search engine.

Well, the threat by Google that it may cease operations in China has certainly set tongues wagging in the east.

Google announced that it would cease censoring results of its Google.cn search engine, after what it says was a series of hacking attacks aimed at human rights activists.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” wrote David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google.

Could this really mean the end of Google in China? And what does it all mean for the rest of Asia? And, in particular, what does it mean for travel?

To get a feel for what travel experts on the mainland think of the development, I made a few calls to contacts this evening.

One had just returned from dinner where the hot topic of the evening was – you guessed it – Google and its future in China.

Says my contact who’s been working in the online travel space for several years: “By coincidence, China’s No.1 search engine Baidu was hijacked by the Iran hacker yesterday morning of local time. Historically Baidu has been very popular among young Chinese citizens while many middle-class professionals still prefer to use Google as the prime search engine when they conduct job-related research or plan their vacations, whether for domestic or overseas travel.”

Google’s departure, he says, would have significant impact on some industry segments in China, like the already weakened export industries, who are increasingly relying on Google for overseas marketing.

“The impact will also be felt by major international OTAs and tourist destinations who are heavily relying on using SEO or paid key word search to market to Chinese consumers.

“For example, when you search ‘Book London hotel’ in Chinese through Google, Booking.com, Agoda and HRS.cn are among the top five natural search results. When you search for ‘Book Singapore hotels’ in Chinese, Agoda and HRS.cn are also among the top 5. With Google’s absence, the international companies need to learn how to play with Baidu’s rules which is more like a business listing service.”

However sources say since the announcement, Google seems to have softened its stand.

One source says: “When I searched for pictures by using the key word of Tiananmen square in English around 3pm this afternoon, it generated a lot of uncensored pictures. But by 10pm, all these sensitive pics had been filtered.”

“Personally I do not believe Google will pull out from China market which is too attractive for any international companies to ignore.

“But this fact reminds us that to succeed in China, multinational companies need to be very flexible with their marketing strategies and too much reliance on one marketing tool will put them in big risk. Twitter is blocked, Facebook is blocked and the same fate for Youtube and blogspot. Who will be the next?

“Without Google, the Chinese will still have a happy life. But it will stop the internet revolution in China.”

Another source said he seriously doubts if Google will pull out. “Their sales team has been scrambling all day to reassure clients and publishers this is not happening.”

He said that in travel advertising, Google was a small player – 5% – behind Qunar (25% share) and Baidu (15-20% share).

“The last time a company threatened the Chinese government and won was Jardine Matheson around 1840. I’m not sure it will happen again.”

News that Google is considering pulling out of the fastest growing consumer market on the planet would leave the Chinese domestic internet with one powerful search engine for travel products.

The search giant says it will be forced to change its current strategy in China if a series of so-called cyber attacks continue on the GMail accounts of domestic human rights activists and those outside of the country sympathetic to their cause.

Alongside the wider economic and diplomatic implications of such high level shenanigans (US secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already waded into the row) is the impact on the burgeoning travel scene in China.

Google damaged its holier than thou (”Do No Evil”) image when it entered China under what many considered to be highly controversial terms in 2006 – limiting access to natural search results for topics such as the Falun Gong organisation and events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Officials now say that if the cyber attacks continue or go unexplained then it will be forced to remove the Chinese government-requested ban on controversial subjects – a move which would no doubt anger the host and effectively see it blocked from the web.

According to the BBC, Google stood to make around $600 million from its Chinese operations in 2010 – a sizeable figure but one it is clearly willing to risk.

Google currently shares search duties – but is not as big – with local engine Baidu.

What Google does provide is organic (albeit, somewhat restricted depending on the topic) listings as well as paid keyword – as opposed to Baidu which is a paid-for only service akin to a classified listings service.

Removing Google from the Chinese market would leave  travellers with one dominant player in general search (no irony lost there for those in the west who have seen Google rise to the top), CTrip for bookings and Qunar for metasearch – all of which are locally owned.

PhoCusWright general manager for Asia, Ram Badrinathan, says: “Baidu will have no competitor in the market and whatever little access to free information Google provided will come to an end.”

Where an exit for Google from China gets very interesting for travel is in the area of natural search that Google provides.

TripAdvisor, for example, relies heavily on its fantastic performance in organic search results for hotels to drive traffic to its site. What would be the impact on its Chinese site (and DaoDao) if Google disappeared from the market and it was forced to buy listings and keywords on Baidu?

The review specialist isn’t alone in this area. Mothership Expedia has also bought heavily into the Chinese market through eLong and Kuxun, both of which presumably are well optimised and also feature highly in natural search results.

A decision by Google to pull out of China (no doubt hugely influenced by what happens at a diplomatic level, now the US administration is involved) is far from a foregone conclusion at this stage.

Indeed, Chinese authorities may in practice attempt to meet the Mountain View, California-based Google metaphorically somewhere in the middle.

Google’s decision to enter China in the first place was full of compromise, so travel firms investing in China and the domestic market will watch with interest as one of the most high profile companies in the world wrestles with the government of the fastest growing economy in the world.

The result of a defamation case in Paris, France, has shed light on the lengths companies will go to if search engines are providing users with incorrect or damaging information.

The case, involving the Centre National Privé de Formation a Distance (CNFDI) and Google, centres on the search giant’s automatic drop-down on its homepage query box.

The system attempts to predict what a user is looking for and puts forward suggestions and the number of results available.

Queries for CNFDI were found to have results returned based on the word “scam” – something the organisation obviously didn’t like.

The Paris court of appeal has swung in favour of CNFDI and ordered Google to remove the suggestion from search results.

For its part Google says the system is automatic, based on the complex algorithmic Kung Fu going behind the scenes, and denies liability.

So given the emotive nature of travel, a product which often triggers consumers to rant in forums and on blogs following unfortunate events on holidays, are travel companies falling foul of the Google Suggest tool?

Tnooz tested all the travel organisations featured in the First Tweet from 50 Travel Companies and it appears that most companies would be pretty pleased with what Google Suggest is throwing back at users.

The only three to find themselves on the receiving end of slightly unsavoury suggestions on Google UK were American Airlines (crash), Air France (crash) and British Airways (strikes) - even Ryanair, with its less than savoury reputation in the media and supposedly among consumers, escaped in a test of other companies.

Meanwhile, perhaps EasyJet will be wondering why this rather unusual equine addition to the suggestions returned from Google US…

This is not a 2010 prediction, but a certainty: Many more travel planning, research and metasearch websites are planned for 2010.

This crowded field promises to get more crowded.

Goissimo.com, a U.K. start-up travel planning and metasearch site,  announced Dec. 24, that its several-week-old beta has been going well and it will launch full-throttle in January, adding that “it is set to revolutionise online travel search and will lead the way into the new decade for a new era of preference-based travel choice for consumers.”

Next month, Goissimo plans to unveil the full version of its Holiday Helper search tool, saved searches, reviews and filters “along with many other exciting new developments.”

Suppliers and intermediaries in the mix include lastminute.com, Hilton, LateRooms, Airtours, Travelocity, booking.com, British Airways, EasyJet and On The Beach, among others, Goissimo says.

However, Europe is not the only arena where the travel-planning frenzy continues unabated.

Centr’d, based in Menlo Park, Calif., filed a notice Dec. 24 with the Securities & Exchange Commission that it has issued stock and raised almost $1.9 million, with another $2.1 million in equity remaining to be sold. The notice doesn’t say what the proceeds are being used for.

Centr’d uses its SentimentAnalysis tool to cull user reviews using natural-language processing technologies and then recommends restaurants, attractions, events and shopping experienced based on user preferences.

There is indeed lots of innovation taking place in the trip-planning sphere on both side of the Atlantic and other parts of the world, and it looks like the cast of new entrants will be looming ever-larger next year.

One month does not a search engine make.

But it’s clear from the comScore’s U.S. search rankings in November that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is making market share gains, and Yahoo’s share of queries are falling.

Google’s queries, meanwhile, continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace.

The question arises, then, whether the pending Bing-Yahoo search partnership finds Bing throwing in its lot with a partner in decline or whether Yahoo can turn things around.

And, is Bing picking up most of its market share from new-partner Yahoo instead of big-time target Google? [The Ask Network and AOL showed market share dips of 10 basis points each in November, as well.]

In November 2009, Google’s market share in search hit a record high of 65.6%, and that amounted to growth of 20 basis points versus October 2009, comScore shows.

Microsoft websites, including Bing, in November continued their steady growth since the Bing launch half a year ago and took a 10.3% market share, an increase of 40 basis points since October 2009. That’s faster than Google is growing, but Bing has a lot longer way to go.

And, Yahoo! websites’ search market share in the U.S. fell 50 basis points to a 17.5% market share in November, according to comScore.

“Bing clearly is showing still-early but significant market share gains,” says Citi’s Mark Mahaney in a research note. “Yahoo is clearly experiencing a material share loss in one of its two core businesses. This puts greater pressure on the company to demonstrate a credible growth strategy with its display advertising segment.”

Mahaney points to Google’s market share gains as “incrementally positive,” although he cautions that Google faces “very significant competition from Internet-related companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft.”

Since the Bing launch, and with a ton of marketing dollars behind it, Microsoft’s search market share has grown from 8.4% to 10.3%.

Things are starting to get interesting — but this is only the beginning of the beginning.

Google says it has no plans to extend its recently launched Comparison Ads project to include products from the travel vertical.

The confirmation comes during a busy week for Google as it rolls out the real-time search, boosts it mobile play and launches the photo search Goggles application.

The Comp Ads scheme was unveiled in October 2009 and creates a list of mortgage products automatically taken from paid-for ads included in its AdWords system.

The launch signalled what could be a fascinating expansion of the AdWords programme, allowing companies bidding on certain keywords to find their product included in a basic yet reasonably intuitive metasearch proforma.

Extending Comparison Ads into travel might have been an interesting experiment, not least to see how its relationship with intermediaries may have been affected, as some argued here.

Google however appears content to keep the service within the financial services sector for the time being.

An official at Google UK says:

“We don’t have any plans to extend comparison ads beyond the current format, or extend it to any other verticals.”

And that’s the end of that. Maybe.

Google hosted a private half-day conference yesterday for folk across the travel sector in the UK.

Gracing the 150 or so delegates with their presence – and presentations – were the likes of Google UK boss Matt Brittin, futurologist Patrick Dixon, and officials from Ebookers, Hilton, lastminute.com and Virgin Atlantic.

The press are not allowed in.

The idea behind the event is to “share insights, debate fresh perspectives and discuss best practices to harness the online opportunity for the travel market moving into 2010″.

Apart from a sarcastic remark on Twitter about Brittin’s revelation that Google is using multivariate testing, there appears to have been a bit of a lack of hard and fast information and ground-breaking news.

However, our mole on the inside reported back a few of the more noteworthy titbits of information:

• Ebookers e-marketing strategy is to “try it and see”; they are fed up of taking external advice and it not working out, they don’t believe in market research but in experimentation. They are looking for the “emotional connection” with users.
• Hilton hotels investing heavily in social; training all hotel managers on how to manage twitter. Lots of discussion about how firms react and respond to social/real time.
• China is growing significantly as a UK outbound market (Euromonitor).
• Overall travel expenditure down around 11% for 2009 (Euromonitor) – the worst the industry has seen in many years (worse than the downturn following September 11 2001 ).
• Growth in specific independent travel; eco-tourism, health tourism, marriage tourism, voluntourism.  Trends are moving towards short, sharp breaks rather than extended packages.
• Lastminute.com investing [NB: and analytics] heavily in exploring power of mobile… but many more traditional firms are long way behind the curve in adapting to mobile.
• Social search did feature to an extent – there was talk about people searching for (and hearing about) deals via Twitter and Facebook.
• Google social search was demoed to show how they are taking account of social in that search results category, and how later down the line twitter mentions etc. will be integrated into the main search results

News and developments on such issues as the ticking timebomb that is Comparison Ads – and others – to follow we presume.

I caught up with Rob Torres, managing director of Google Travel, following his Center Stage slot at the recent PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando.

Appearing alongside Suzie Reider, chief marketing officer and head of advertising for sister company YouTube, Torres stressed there are no plans for Google to do a “Troogle” – a bookings site for travel.

[Editor: not directly]

The Next Big Idea for Google to share, however, is video and the travel category.

Torres’s big pitch was to get the industry to think about Google – and YouTube in particular-  as a place to build a brand.

“Stop thinking about internet demand as just for capture and start thinking about a driver of brand awareness,” Torres says.

Here is full transcript of what followed:

Q: In your speech you said “stop thinking about internet demand capture and about a driver of brand awareness”. Tell me more about the process of moving from direct response to brand building in search marketing?

I think there are huge opportunities for branding in search. Our biggest partners are already spending significantly in building brands. We all do.

Search and video are new channels that really work well for brand advertising. The challenge is how to do measurement.

If you look for just direct response and compare video to search then it will not perform.

But we hear this is from partners that are still advertising on TV and who take out radio ads. Some (like DMOs) still do lots of print advertising.

The CPM rates on online video are much cheaper than these media and have the potential to capture a greater viewership.

Q: You mentioned in your presentation that 13% of online travellers have uploaded a video. That is a lot of videos and engagement. But how does a marketer track the success of engaging with that. Is it just a matter of bringing across ratings and viewer numbers like TV?

Ultimately want people to view the video but impression of the ad is not bad either [as a measure of success].

YouTube has 40 million impressions per day.

Marketers should start comparing video on YuoTube with TV advertising and put it in the marketing mix.

Generally speaking, TV advertising is ego advertising [meaning not very measurable].

Q: In the offline TV advertising world there is an eco-system to help with publishing video – agencies for creative and media buyers for placement. Do you anticipate that this agency system will emerge for online video?

We have great relationships with agencies already. Often it is a disconnect between clients and agencies that are sometimes causing a problem.

The agencies do not yet understand the value of online video. We’ll get there.

Q: In an earlier session on trip planning, Laura Castillo of Google discussed the increase in the number of words being used in each search from less than two to almost three.  We also discussed the incorporation of social media (ie Twitter) directly into the search results. Finally consumers are asking open ended questions like “where should I go next” that are not easily answered by the information on one site. Information is needed from multiple sites to answer. What does this mean for the future of search?

Search is going to get better and better. Multi–answer [answers from more than one place] is part of the reason for the incorporation of social media into the results.

On longer queries in search terms, the more terms in a search, the more relevant the result that Google can provide.

It is not well known but in September we increased size of search box because we saw an inclination for more words and what to encourage that.

If we can serve more relevant result then we can meet the aim of getting the consumer off Google as fast as possible

[Referring to search start ups such as Goby and Triporati that are doing travel search in a different way] We encourage competition – helps us to see what is missing in search industry.

We agree that natural search does not do a great job in delivery all results.

We hope these start ups are successful but are not worried about  the impact on our business.

It does spur me to think how do we improve what we are doing.

[Referring to Bing] Bing is not taking away share from us. Some of the things they are doing are great and opens up eyes to different ways to search but not losing share.

Q: Introducing social media content into search results will likely change the way Google assess relevance and the quality score in search results. The old test for quality was around contents and inbound links. Giving quality scores for Facebook updates or tweets will require something different. What do you think?

We have smart people working on this. Will require a new way of measuring quality.

Q: At the beginning of the year I wrote a post saying that this would not be the year for mobile.  I based this on the economic challenges driving companies to focus on the core business rather than new channels.  Then a few weeks ago Google announced the AdMob deal, your third largest acquisition ever.  A company focused on mobile advertising. This seemed to prove me wrong. What do you think about mobile – is 2009 finally the year for mobile in online travel?

You were not wrong about 2009 for mobile in travel as there is very little adoption still, especially in advertising.

Buying Admob will give us the infrastructure we need for mobile based advertising.

That said, we have seen “apps” become such a big word in 2009. The rapid spread of apps all happened this year.

We are in that space with the Android platform.  I was very interested to hear from the TripIt team that it was ten times easy to develop for Android than the iPhone.

I think 2010 will be year we start see suppliers advertising on and getting good returns form on mobile.

For 2010 we are very bullish on the mobile space.

A debate here on Tnooz in October 2009 saw all manner of opinions flying in about the merits – or not – of placing content above the imaginary fold-line on a website.

But it is probably worth applying the same scrutiny to search engines.

Until reasonably recently, firing in the search term “hotel new york” on Google, for example, would see organic results taking up the vast majority of top half of the page, displayed alongside paid-for AdWords in a narrow right-hand navigation bar.

Not any more.

The addition of maps has fundamentally changed the make-up of search results – so much so that all the inventory above the fold is commercially supported.

So while many will see this as a natural inevitability of Google’s creeping commercialisation, does it effect how users interact with natural results or increase the apparent relevancy or perceived reliability of paid-for links?

Some more on this subject here from SEO Book.