Ive seen some matching errors in my time in search engine marketing. It used to be one of the best sales tools, and still is in a less obvious way, to take screenshots in advance of a pitch, or sales meeting, of a prospects PPC ads appearing on keywords which are unrelated to their product or service.

But if there is one company you would expect to be able to understand and control their matching system, it would be Google themselves. But apparently not! A search I performed on Google recently for the phrase “marketing jobs” brought up a PPCad for Google Adwords. At first I didn’t realise what had happened, but then it clicked, and a search on the single word phrase “marketing” brought up the Google ad also. Google are broad matching and haven’t included the term jobs as a negative keyword!

Now you argue that they don’t really need to as they wont be paying for the clicks anyway, but surely they should be practicing what they preach!?!

And while I am at it, the ad text isn’t to impressive either. Disappointing effort Google, shame on you!

…..or at least its search box does. as announced on the Official Google Blog yesterday Google is increases the size of its search box, and also the text font of your search query and its own search suggestions. A slightly strange thing to do given there ws little wrong with it in the first place, so what could be the reasons for doing this?

• Aesthetics – It could be a purely aesthetic change.  Anybody involved in web design (or any other form of design for that matter) knows how picky designers can be.  So it could just be that Google’s design team got together and decided that it looked a lot better a font size up.
• The Bing effect - Lets face it the Google homepage (unless you are using iGoogle) is pretty bland.  This has been made even more apparent by the Bing design and the user love for the daily background image.  Is this the start of a Google move to combat this?
• Search Suggestion Focus – Although Google have increase the size of the whole box, and search font and the search suggestions font, it could be the latter which is the driving force behind the move.  Google could be looking to place more emphasis, and promote the use of, its suggested search queries.  In theory the more these are used, the more accurate they should become (if Google is doing the smart thing and tracking their usage).  The more accurate they become the more useful for Google users, so perhaps this move is aimed at emphasising them more.

Before and after image below (click for larger image), any other reasons they could be doing this?