Google Tips Cause Controversy

Tuesday January 2, 2007

Welcome to the new year, and welcome to the new round of complaints about Google. It seems there is a lot of Sturm und Drang about Google "tip" boxes that show up for certain keywords, such as "calendar" or "pictures," even if the actual search phrase was "Microsoft calendar" or "Yahoo! pictures."

I saw at least half a dozen headlines in my Google Reader newsfeeds this morning. Most of them questioned if this was a fair practice for a search engine.

The tip boxes are advertisements for Google products. Here's an example for the search phrase calendar. They're near, but not in search results, and it doesn't appear that Google is manipulating the actual search results. Google has tons of products, but most people only know about their search, so how else are they going to be introduced to new products?

It seems to me that Google only has a few choices.

Hope desperately that word-of-mouth makes all their products popular, but don't advertise.
Make a really crowded search engine start page that advertises most of their products at once, like Yahoo! and Microsoft do, or
Advertise products one at a time contextually, like they do for AdSense.

Given those choices, I'd rather see the tips boxes.