“Look in the mirror, Google. Your horns are showing”
Posted on | May 13, 2009 | 9 Comments
Google plans to allow firms to bid for the trade names of their competitors as advertising keywords, BusinessWeek reports. For example: Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) could bid to have its ads appear when users search for “HP” or “Hewlett-Packard.”
That’s not evil? In what universe?
Definitely an article worth reading. In times of struggle and trying to please investors, you have to do what you have to do to bring in the money bags. This is crossing the line a bit. I remember hearing something about this but didn’t have the chance to read/write an article… so I figured linking won’t hurt 
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9 Responses to ““Look in the mirror, Google. Your horns are showing””
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May 13th, 2009 @ 2:53 am
It’s kind of funny you know that Google imposes stuff on us like “Traffic Quality”, pretending they’re doing it for the advertisers, and then they do something like this which is clearly only to Google’s benefit.
If Company A starts advertising on keywords for Company B and Company B starts advertising on keywords for Company A, and assuming they both get a relatively similar number of searches, then the only clear winner here is Google.
May 13th, 2009 @ 2:56 am
Exactly my thoughts. You’re going to get companies competing for their own keyword searches… you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m definitely going to watch how this pans out.
May 13th, 2009 @ 8:56 am
I don’t think that’s evil at all!
1) The consumer wins. These big corporations (as we have seen) don’t have the public’s best interest at heart. The more competition, the better for the consumer. They would all like to be a monopoly. Fortunately, Google is stepping in to keep them on the edge (of course Google is doing this for its own profit, but that’s fine)
2) The small time entrepreneur wins. The little guy now has a chance to get recognition and traffic by bidding PPC against the big guys! Imagine the possibilitites. With a well-targeted PPC campaign, you could get 1% of the traffic from Dell on a great day, and that would surely boost your business!
See, it’s the big corps who can afford to protect (vigorously) their trademarks and interests. We can’t compete against them. Our only hope is acquisition. The more the little guy can challenge them, the more opportunities for us. This is one of them. Plus, it’s good for domainers (typosquatters notwithstanding)
May 13th, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
I also see this as a way to keep domainers in check because if companies were not allowed to bid on each others terms then generic search clicks would be worth so much more. They are essentially adding more ad inventory to the mix.
Google has the best business model I have ever seen. This move adds lots and lots of cash and keeps competitors at bay.
May 14th, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
If I search for something related to HP, I should be able to trust Google to deliver sites about HP in their listings. If they don’t, I’ll search elsewhere.
May 25th, 2009 @ 6:02 am
The bidding system of google is a quite bad idea i think.It affects the sites which are on top rankings.
June 29th, 2009 @ 2:59 pm
I think Google is loosing its fashion. end.
July 13th, 2009 @ 5:34 pm
Oh my, Google. That is crossing the line.
But the companies may still consider that as a marketing strategy, I think…
I feel bad for the smaller companies if that will happen, though.
January 1st, 2010 @ 12:27 pm
i really wonder what the future holds for google… will they stick true to their slogan “do no evil”?
food for thought.. food for thought.. i hope they do.
thanks for the great blog post