Will Google’s Search within Search spell Doom’s Day for the Flourishing Affiliate Marketing?

Google’s new Search within Search tool might create a chaos in the world of affiliate marketing and affiliate network. According to the report by IDC search analyst Sue Feldman - "Hijacking Affiliate Revenue: Google's New Search Within Search Tool,"- Google’s new destination search tool can invite serious risks for publishers, while it attempts to make information more available to the end users.

According to a newspost by Thoman Claburn, in Information Week.com, by introducing this tool, where a user can search specific data through a search box that comes in the result pages of the Google SERPs, the search engine would risk alienating its affiliates and other web site owners by keeping for itself traffic and the revenue thereof.

How is this possible? Visitors seeking specific information or an ad might have visited a particular site where ad is flashed. This would have helped the affiliate generate revenue for display of that particular ad and helping a visitor go to the site via the publisher/ affiliate’s site.

But having another search box in Google SERPs itself, visitors can conduct follow up searches without leaving Google.com. This would a visitor, the particular ad being searched directly from Google and therefore the revenue generated from the ad would go directly to Google and not the Affiliate.

According to Google spokesperson, “By showing ads on the results page from the 'search within a site' feature, we aim to help our users find ads that are both useful and relevant to their searches. Our goal is to provide the best user experience, and ads that are related to searches from competing providers are useful to consumers. If a site owner wants to present sponsored listings for these searches, then that site owner can participate in the AdWords auction."

While Google maintains that it developed this feature to improve the user search experience, some industry watchers view this tool introduced by Google, as another money making mechanism, others are skeptical about its impact on the flourishing affiliate marketing.