Find sites that use Google Adwords

December 8, 2006 2:30 PM

Is there any way to search for specific types of web sites that use Google Adwords (or any other sponsored link service)?

My company is considering putting ads on our web pages, but we want to see if any similar companies are doing this. Other than going to web sites in our industry one at a time and looking for ads, is there any way to search for pages that have these kinds of ads? I've tried searching on an industry keyword plus "Ads by Goooooogle" and "Ads by Google," but all I get are articles about Google Adwords.

posted by Joleta to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

In general, you can't search for them because the ads are dynamically generated by javascript and therefore not indexed by web crawlers. This is true for Google and most other ad networks.

An exception might be searching for text link ads, since the very purpose of those ads is to get noticed and indexed by search engines. Although there's no guarantee that sites using those ads would actually link back to the text-link-ads website.
posted by helios at 2:53 PM on December 8, 2006