Google sitesearch

Just a word about the search field on the top of the right sidebar.

It's not "just" the regular free Google sitesearch. Besides the regular search results, it's serving payed ads, called AdWords.

Basically, when you search for a certain keyword such as Pantone it will give you related useful ads of companies who subscribed to this specific adword. The cool thing about these ads that they are automatically rated based on user interaction.

So, if you do a search on a specific keyword and than don't click on the ad that appears, that specific ad gets downrated, because you voted for it being uninteresting or irrelevant to that specific AdWord. Vice versa, the more people click on that ad the higher it's rating and the more it appears for that search keyword. This way Google makes sure their ads on searches remain relevant and useful for the search engine users.

The downside of such automated system is that bots can be programmed to periodically search for specific Adwords and methodically do not click on competitor ads, thus rating them way down and theoretically eliminating a whole AdWord campaign.

I'm sure Google will have a way to fight this approach very soon. The simplest way would be to monitor a heavy searching IP, that can possibly be a bot and eliminate it's interaction from the rating system.