Hmmmm....Interesting.

Found this in my travels.

A query on Google for "NBC Olympics" returns a video link to a
two-minute advertisement for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Torino,
and an unobvious change to Google's Sponsored Links boxes on top of
search results.

Is it a paid search result or an organic search result? MediaPost
pointed to the search results that appear on Google when performing
a query for NBC Olympics.

The top organic result goes to a Google Video, a two-minute piece
featuring rock/rap act Flipsyde playing "Someday" while scenes of
US Olympians play on-screen. Only one paid link appeared on the
search result page, to a firm unrelated to the Olympics or NBC.

The video ends with a display of the Olympic and NBC logos. Also,
the same video can be found on iTunes for free, as Flipsyde's
website noted.

Google has blurred the line a bit between paid and organic results
here. The blue background that is normally very evident for
Google's paid search results appears to have been toned back
dramatically to the point of being nearly indistinguishable from
the typical white background.

Other search results where the "One Box" appears atop Google's
SERPs have the same very pale light blue background. Also, instead
of the words "Sponsored Link" appearing at the top right of the
NBC Olympics box, they instead display "In collaboration with NBC
Olympics."

 

NBC must have paid out big bucks for this one!
But yes, a lot of searches have that funky box at the top.
These are paid listings that the advertisers want there.

 

Google "Snowboarding" and the same thing is their, also photographs above the organic search results.
Is this the direction Google is heading in?