Google Tips: A slippery slope?
Blake Ross has recently blogged about Google Tips and whether it’s a sign that Google are starting to care less about offering an unbiased view and more about pushing their own services.
Personally, I think the Google tips are fine on their own. At least on the UK site, the tips are currently appearing below the sponsored advertisements so it means they’re not trying to make themselves more prominent than any rivals that choose to advertise on their site and for users both the tips and the advertisements appear differently to usual search results.
Blake mentions that these applications Google are promoting are not best in class which is why they don’t naturally appear at the top of the Google search results. However, it’s not usually the best that appears top it’s the one that is most commonly associated with that word so by Google promoting these products will make more people be aware of them and try them out. If they’re not the best in class people will still see the other options in the search results.
Google is only showing these tips on Google branded search, adsense for search customers who place a Google search box on their page in return for a share of their ad revenue do not feature these tips. So Google at the moment don’t seem to be doing anything wrong either for their users, their adwords advertisers and those adsense customers who use Google advertising to make money (DISCLAIMER: this site is one).
One thing we do need to be careful about is making sure this is not a slippery slope. A search for Yahoo Mail should never return Gmail as the preferred result. But at the moment I don’t see anything wrong with the current situation.
Google have set themselves some high standards in the past and when it looks like those standards are dropping then people get disappointed. Personally, I think this is fuss over nothing, but I’m happy to see that people are keeping an eye on Google and calling out when they think their standards are slipping.
The main thing that worries me about Google is that adwords can often be used to mislead customers for example, if you search for IE7 many of the ads are for ‘free’ downloads that you need to pay to access, this also occurs for other popular software. Firefox is a bit different, most of the ads for Firefox direct you to a page full of links to the Google Toolbar version of Firefox - Google pays sites $1 per download. I’d like to see sites that trick people into paying for free downloads removed quickly. These in my eyes remove some of the credibility of adwords.
January 5th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
[…] Personally I thought the tips were fine on their own as long as they weren’t the start of a slippery slope where Google started quietly increasing the importance of their services within their search results. But it’s good to see that Google has reacted quickly to peoples concerns and removed the feature. […]
April 18th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
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