Facebook Sponsored Results Killed Off After Short-Lived Run

It seems Facebook is still trying to learn how to monetize its search feature and figure out what works best, as the social network will be killing off sponsored results in search after less than a year of first being introduced. Facebook has decided to streamline its advertising efforts in order to make it a little easier for advertisers to market on the social networking site.

This essentially means that ads will be just a bit less intrusive than usual, but don't expect an ad-less experience the next time you log on to Facebook. Facebook says that they will be officially killing off sponsored results in July, where from that point on, advertisers will no longer be able to buy sponsored results in search.

Another reason why Facebook most likely ended sponsored results is that the ad platform doesn't quite fit well with the new Graph Search. Facebook tested ads in Graph Search, but the ads aren't targeted to a user's search queries. Of course, getting rid of sponsored results isn't necessarily a failure for Facebook, but rather advertisers are changing the ways they reach out to people.

Sponsored results are search results that appear at the top of the list under a "Sponsored" title, so that you know it's a sponsored result. They certainly weren't terribly intrusive, but they were rather annoying when you were trying to quickly navigate to a page when searching for it. Hopefully, things should be a bit more cleaned up now.

Again, this won't completely kill all ads on Facebook — the social network will still be littered with all sorts of crazy sponsored content. However, users won't be seeing ads in search results anymore, which should make it easier for users to find what they're looking for without being bombarded by annoying ads.

VIA: CNET