How to highlight ads on the Google search results page in Chrome
Google has been the most popular, and widely used search engine for over a decade now. If you’ve used it for as long, or longer, you might recall some of the design changes that its search results page has gone through. One notable change that was made was increasing the number of ads, and making them look more ‘natural’ i.e., like an actual search result. If you often have trouble differentiating between a search result and an ad, you can install Google Search Ads Highlighter in Chrome. It will add a yellow highlight to ads making them more obvious.
Highlight ads on Google search results page
Download Google Search Ads Highlighter from the Chrome web store. Use Google like you normally do and bear in mind that not all search results will yield ads on the page.
When there is an ad though, it will have a light yellow highlight and it will be faded out so that actual search results are easier to identify. You can change both the highlight color and how faded out the ads are by clicking the extension’s icon next to the URL bar. The color you pick can be anything so if you think the default yellow is too light, you’re free to go with something much darker.
This extension only works on the Google search results page, it will not work on other websites that run Google ads, this goes for both text-based ads and image/banner ads.
Google Search Ads Highlighter is not an ad-blocking tool. Ads may not be welcome but sometimes, the ones featured on the search results are actually more useful than the results themselves. This may not be true for generic searches but if you’re looking for specific information about a product or business, and they’ve been pro-active enough to target ads for their IPs, you will most likely find the ads in the results will get you the information you need. This may be why the extension doesn’t just hide them; there’s a chance they might be useful.
To be fair, the ads do feature a small ‘ad’ box next to their URL to indicate that you’re looking at an ad and this tag is a different color from the title and snippet but, it is easy to miss because of its size and because it is the same color as the URL that’s given. You can spot ads without this extension but it takes most of the effort out of the job.
