During the Olympics Google worked with NBC to provide NBC Scores Graphical Ads/Promos. They may be perceived as ads, but they do not look like they are ads based on the click through URL. The big deal back then was that if you did a search on olympics you received the "one box" result. But try a search on loan today and you may get;

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This may not be the most relevant result to those searching on the term loan. So I thought I would click over, which has the click through URL;

http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=wolympics4&q=http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/5085169/detail.html%3Fqs%3D%3Bt%3D14%3Btab%3DResults

So this does not look like a loan ad by the URL or the result. So I figured I would test this out on some more popular olympic names. Such as Shaun White or Apolo Anton Ohno neither brought up the NBC olympics box, in the last name query or full name query.

Something has to be wrong here; (1) Why would Google show an olympics result for a term like "loan"? (2) Why wouldn't they show an olympics box for a full name of a popular olympics athlete?

I started a thread on this discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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