AdSense related searches draw attention

I will pass on the feedback from this thread, but I have to admit that the first time I heard about adding related searches, I thought it was a great idea. I remember when we moved from 3 AdWords ads to up to 8 down the right-hand side. At the time, a lot of engineers were skeptical. The thing that Larry/Sergey saw pretty clearly back then was that the ads can be just as useful as the search results in many situations.
So I would say to give this a little time before judging the related searches. Personally, I still think that making these ad banners more useful to users could very well help reduce banner blindness, draw more attention to the ads because they're more useful, and make surfers happier with a site.

Our ultimate goal with AdSense is to come up with a solution that is good for publishers, surfers, and advertisers--and it needs to be good for all three groups to succeed. Anyway, that's just something to think about. I spend a lot of time thinking about "short-term bucks" vs. "long-term usefulness of a site" and in my book, if you make a site more useful then surfers keep coming back. The related searches feel like the latter to me, but I hope people give the related searches some time before they reach a conclusion either way.

Okay, much too late for me--off to bed. See ya tomorrow...