Google Step Ups for self promotion

[paul]

From the article; "They're starting to promote all these other products" that were created or acquired during the last couple of years, says LeeAnn Prescott, an analyst at Hitwise".
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[sanderson]

The title itself is interesting,

"Google needs promotion?"

so I couldn't stop myself posting here before reading the full news.

I will read it now.

Thanks for the news.

[kev woodman]

The article talks about Google promoting certain of its services rather than the company name as a whole. I hadn't heard of the real estate service so I guess some sort of promotion is probably warranted.

[paul]

Few market analytics says "Google “tips” are Google promos for its own products and services that appear at the top of Google SERPs", also Matt Cutts his employer provides his own question & answer followed by his "tips" about different Google service. I don’t think google is facing any tough competition presently to look for self promotion .

[kev woodman]

It may not be a matter of competition - there's no point in developing services if nobody uses them because nobody has ever heard of them.

[kev woodman]

I've just come across an article related to this on Sitepoint and it seems like some people are certainly a bit miffed by Google's approach.

The article is headed 'Google Starts Down the Slippery Slope' and talks about Google 'doctoring' it's search results :

' If you've been searching for terms like "istockphoto" or "yahoo calendar" you might have noticed a 'Tip' at the top of the results. This is a tip from Google suggesting that you might like to check out its own site for photos, a calendar, or whatever it is you've searched for.

Now, I believe that any search engine's goal should be to provide the most relevant results for the searcher. When someone searches for "istockphoto", it's pretty clear that they want the site istockphoto.com! '

Before going on to make the very good point that:

'For a search engine to provide as its top free "result" a link to a competitive service (that the search engine company owns) is just plain rude -- it goes against everything search engines should aim for. If a search engine works to manipulate searchers away from the items they're actually looking for, well, I think it's just started down a slippery slope.'

The above quotes are taken from the article by Brendan Sinclair. Food for thought. After all if you do a search for Open Office on Windows Live Search you don't get a 'tip' directing you to the MS Office sales department.

[Administrator]

I've searched both the keywords you have mentioned with and without quotes ( "" ) but never saw anything unusual. Are you sure that you are getting those results on your end ?

[kev woodman]

Presumably you're referring to the keywords mentioned in the article? I haven't searched for these myself but then I haven't run across these Google 'tips' at all. Maybe you only see them on Google.com (rather than .co.uk). or maybe they only appear at certain times or perhaps Google have been stung by the criticism and have now removed them?

[Administrator]

Nope. I have checked in google.com from a US based windows server as well and there's nothing strange.

Probably that was experimental or they hired someone recently from Yahoo who did those changes

[kev woodman]

They are very sensitive to criticism so they may have stopped doing it but I suspect we will see more of this sort of thing from Google. After all they have shareholders they now have to be accountable to and as much as everyone likes to think of them being all warm and fuzzy they have too much money and power not to be corrupted in some way.