Google does nothing to change its searches while improving its advertising, but that's not how the Associated Press told the story.
For quite some time, Google (which runs on upwards
of 10,000 Linux boxes) has offered advertisers ways to present short
text messages along with targeted search results. These
"sponsored links" have more in common with newspaper
classifieds than with banners or any other form of graphical display
advertising, and they have been the source of very few complaints. More
importantly, they mostly seem to be working for everybody involved:
users, advertisers and Google.
Recently, Google updated the program--previously called AdWords and now
named
AdWords Select--with a variety of improvements.
For both users and advertisers, it improved the chances for
relevant sponsored links.
But on Tuesday, February 19, the Associated Press put out a story
by Michael Liedtke (here it is on the New York Times site) about the
new program, delivering news that Google had morphed into yet another
pay-for-placement search engine. It starts off this way:
Online search engine maker Google Inc.
is introducing a program that allows Web sites to be displayed more
prominently if sponsors pay more money--an advertising-driven
system derided by critics as an invitation to deceptive business
practices.
Four paragraphs pass before Liedtke writes:
Mountain View-based Google will
continue to reserve most of its site for results sorted by relevance
to a search request--a model that has cultivated a local following
among Web surfers and turned the 300-employee company into one of the
Internet's emerging power brokers.
But writing "continues to reserve most of its
site" hardly deflects the thrust of the story, which is mostly
about pay-for-placement.
Since AP is the primary source of news for
countless newspapers and other news organizations, the story was
picked up all over the place and then run under headlines that
delivered the same bad news:
- "Google offers 'bid for placing' web searches",
Silicon.com
- "Google Lets Sites Bid for Rankings",
Excite
- "Google lets sites bid for rankings", Orlando
Sentinel
- "Google introducing 'pay-for-placement' program",
Nando
Times
This whole situation proved to be one where the
press release did a better job of telling the
story.
As far as I've been able to tell, the only
news organization that got the story right was CNET, where Lisa M. Bowman
wrote "Google unveils new pay-for-play plan". But
even there the headline gave the impression that Google was now a
pay-for-placement search engine. And, as with the AP piece, the
secondary story was about Google's "rivalry" with
Overture Services,
Inc., which seems the antithesis of Google: "The Leader in
Pay-for-Performance" search services.
Of course, the whole thing got
thrashed out on Slashdot, where a careful reader
would gather that Google had, in fact, produced a system that improved
matters for everyone concerned. Ads were still unobtrusive, and
(among other improvements) advertisers paid only for actual
click-throughs.
Here's how Cindy McCaffrey, Google's VP of Corporate
Marketing, put it in an e-mail to me yesterday:
All we've done is
modify our AdWords self-service program so that advertisers can
pay on a CPC basis (this is good news). The search results continue
to be as unbiased and objective as ever. We do not allow advertisers
to influence rankings in any way through payment.
What remains to be seen is how much damage AP has
done to Google's reputation.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.