One simple reason why Google has shifted search-ads leftwards

Today, while reading a story on TechCrunch about Google shifting search-ads to the left of the page, I looked at some Google search results on the 21" LCD (widescreen, with 1.6:1 ratio) of my workstation at my company, and realized that Google might have done this for a very simple reason - to counter search-ad-blindness on large, widescreen displays.

Placing search-induced ads on the extreme right of a webpage is going to be significantly less effective on large-sized, widescreen monitors, as the images below demonstrate (it is important to emphasize that this effect can be appreciated better by actually sitting on a large, widescreen LCD, than by merely looking at the screenshots below):

The original screenshot with search-ads in the middle

Edited screenshot with ads moved to the extreme-right

It is easy to see that for all practical purposes, search-ads are invisible to a user on a large, widescreen monitor, if they are placed on the extreme-right. The user's eyes are affixed to the left, leading to the search-ads getting ignored automatically.

And users only click ads they see...