A small percentage of Graph Search users are now seeing some ads in their search results, marking the first time that Facebook has put any sort of advertising in their new product.
Josh Constine at TechCrunch has a shot of the ads, which look like your basic sidebar ads. The Graph Search ads appear between the page breaks in Graph Search results, if there’s more than one page of results on the particular query.
The ads are not based on your specific Graph Search search – in fact, they’re simply ads targeted to your basic information. This includes age, gender, likes, Open Graph activity, and of course, cookies. Otherwise known as the most basic form of ads that Facebook has employed for years – the ones you see gracing the side of your news feed on desktop. They’ll sport an image, some text, and clicking on them will lead you to a third-party site.
This is small test. The ads are only being tested on a small percentage of Graph Search users, and Facebook has still yet to roll out Graph Search to all users.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Eventually, Graph Search ads could be targeted based on keywords. Like Facebook’s Sponsored Search results of yore, businesses could pay to suggest queries inside the Graph Search bar. But for now, most of you won’t see any ads in Graph Search (considering you even have it). And for those who do, they’ll simply be standard info-targeted ads at the page breaks on search results.
Still, it’s a start. And you know more is coming.