Google’s primary source of income, as you all might be aware, is through advertisements. In a move that could potentially scale up the company’s revenue, Google is testing the possibility of adding shopping ads right to the new tab page of Chrome browser.
First spotted by Techdows, the feature is not functional yet and currently exists behind a Chrome flag in the latest Canary build. Once enabled, the feature will show shopping ads based on your Google activity on Chrome across Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.
“You’re seeing this item based on your previous activity using Google services. You can see your data, delete it and change your settings at myactivity.google.com,” reads the description of the feature.
If you’re interested to see the feature yourself, you should go to chrome://flags and enable the flags ‘NTP Modules’ and ‘NTP Shopping Tasks Module’. Apart from shopping ads, Google is also working on a recipe tasks module and kaleidoscope module for the new tab page. However, they are not live so far.
It is worth mentioning that the shopping ads feature doesn’t work for real-time data just yet. When you’re enabling the flag, you should choose ‘Enabled – Fake Data’ to see the card. After enabling them, do not forget to restart the browser.
Fortunately, there is an option to disable these cards, at least for now. When you click on the Customize floating action button and switch to the Cards section from the side menu, you will see the toggle to hide cards.
With all that said, we’re not sure when Google is planning to integrate shopping ads to the new tab page. Since this is still in experimental stage, we will have to wait to see if Google actually enables this feature by default on future versions of Chrome.
