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That "Related" box that was spotted not long ago has been released to the general public, with several options for publishers to choose from.

With the Google Related Links box, you get a simple box with contextual news, web page and search results to the page you are already reading.

Now, for serious publishers, this is a bit of a puzzler. What do you gain by using the Related Links box? It isn't a special AdSense unit, it doesn't make any money, you can't add anything to it to make money, so why would you use it. So, while it may seem that this is more for people who like putting lots of widgets in their blog sidebars, I've got an alternative idea:

The Related Links sizes are perfect, matching up with some of the most popular AdSense ad unit box sizes. What you should be doing is altering the Related code to match the color scheme of your AdSense ads, saving it to a seperate file on your server, and pointing to that file as your alternate AdSense ad!

Ta-da! Anytime Google doesn't have an ad to serve you, it shows headlines and other useful links. This will cause frequent visitors to look at the ad space more often, and when the ad does show up, they'll be more likely to notice it.

Yes, there are reasons why this wouldn't work, but if it did, wouldn't it be a brilliant idea? Someone should implement this and tell me how it works.

(via Google Blogoscoped)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.