It's a testament to Google's influence in the search field that any mention of banner ads on Google pages is met with widespread fear, curiosity, cynicism, reassurance from the company, and further questioning. the further questioning was recently conducted by Danny Sullivan at SEW, who found Marissa Mayer on vacation and tried to clarify how much wiggle room Google has left itself on the question of banner ads. Mayer affirmed, as she had already in the Unofficial Google blog, that banners on the Google home page (as presented to users not signed in) were out of the question, and any reasonable observer would believe this. Google's trust equity would be damaged by flashing ads on the famously pristine flagship page, and nobody knows that more than Google.

Danny did coax Marissa Mayer to acknowledge that the personalized home page is another story entirely, and that targeted ads (text and banner, presumably), are not out of the question there. Not soon, though, according to Mayer.