A firestorm of negativity has surrounded Google in recent weeks concerning the company’s practice of advertising its own services as “tips” in SERP pages queried by users. At least for today, the company has put that practice on hold.
It seems that when the blogosphere speaks, Google listens (for the most part).
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was the first to spot the news this afternoon. After a public outcry and allegations that Google had embraced the Dark Side of the Force (who would have ever made that outlandish statement?) the company seems to have responded to the cries of the people and removed its “tips” from search result pages.
Is Google getting a raw deal in this? This is the criticism from Mozilla developer Blake Ross:
“First, two notes. One, Yahoo and Ask already do this, but they didn’t build their businesses on the promise of being unconventionally trustworthy.”
So, does Google get held to a higher standard than other companies? The PPC Blog puts it this way:
“I think Google does get a bit of a rough deal in comparison to the other search engines. Why? Simply because there is that much more expectation for Google to do no evil, so to speak. We expect it elsewhere, so it’s like a complement in many ways to Google.”
Like it or not, this is an issue of fairness here. Microsoft and Yahoo both employ similar tactics, yet bloggers and writers (myself included) have been quick to jump on the “let’s slam Google” bandwagon for basically employing what you could call standard marketing procedures in terms of peer comparison.
Matt Cutts, resident Googler extraordinaire and rock star to geeky fanboys everywhere, weighs in on the fairness debate:
Whether it’s fair or not, it’s a fact that people expect more from Google than other companies. People compare other search engines to Google, but people compare Google to perfection. We have such passionate users that they’ll complain loudly if they think Google is ever straying from the right path. If you’re a Googler, it may feel frustrating. Instead, I’d choose to be grateful, because that passionate feedback keeps our heads on straight.
When our users yell at Google, they care and want us to do the right thing (for their idea of what the right thing is). What other company gets that kind of feedback? Besides, if Yahoo or Microsoft jumped off a building, would you jump off too? 🙂 So yes, if the decision were up to me, I’d remove these tips or scale them way back by making sure that they are very relevant and targeted.
Apparently, the top brass at the Googleplex actually read Matt’s blog. The tips are gone for now, but a deeper question remains in how Google is judged in comparison to its peers.
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Joe is a staff writer for webproworld. Visit webproworld for the latest ebusiness news.