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Google Evil?January 2nd, 2007 by Narendra |
[Major Update: Google appears to have stopped surfacing tips with the term 30boxes. Thank you Google. We are happy to see that you are listening to the Web community at large!]
We have been big fans of Google for a long time but are quite disappointed with their new “tips” feature that has been generating a lot of online discussion.
Here’s the thing. If I search on Google for “30Boxes calendar” and put it in quotation marks, I just don’t think it is right to drop a promotion for Google Calendar at the top of the search results. Do you?
[Update: just to be clear, I have 3 separate issues. One is a competitve emotional response (not a big deal). The second is that I think that this type of promotion runs counter to the standards that Google holds their advertisers to. And third (which ultimately irritates me the most), is that it is a bad user experience. In the graphic below, I am a savvy user who knows that typing a query in quotation marks yields a very specific response and I don’t want to be bothered with tips for alternative/competitive products. It is a similar feeling to having the old gator product installed and having it tell you to visit barnesandnoble.com with a popup when you typed in borders.com]
Tags: 30boxes, google, gcal, googlecalendar, blakeross, techcrunch
30 Boxes!
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Do a search on anything with the term calendar inside. It still comes up with the same tip. Nothing personal against 30boxes.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Hey, even the telephone company advertises. :)
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Looks like any search with the word “calendar” gets the same tip. I don’t think they’re picking on you specifically.
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Justin/Michael,
Yeah. I think that it makes sense on generic searches. Yahoo does something similar called a shortcut. I just have a problem with it when using specific product names or trademarks. In this case, Yahoo backs off and doesn’t surface a shortcut.
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I’m completely with you - and I work for a company that most people who have never worked here think is just as “evil” :)
http://mike.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FBABF8E542F5D5DB!7758.entry
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:01 am
At the end of the day, the search engine is Google’s product and it is legitimate for them to use it to advertise their other products, although I can obviously see why this is annoying.
However, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I actually don’t even register those tips (and I suspect most people won’t) simply because you are all so attuned to the google search result format that the brain tunes it out. It’s kind of like the way I have never even been aware of all the advertising that runs alongside my gmail. Intellectually I know it’s there but I really don’t register it and just reflexly home in on the information I want to see. I suspect that most people would do the same.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:13 am
I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with it. In the end Google is still a company whose main goal is to make some money. Leveraging their search monopoly to do so may not be nice, but it’s not exceedingly evil either.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:37 am
I agree 100%. It is not fair of Google to monopolize like that. Their calendar software should show up in the search results just like everyone else’s.
Tell me who to complain to and I surely will.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:59 am
It may not be evil, but Google have worsened their service, IMHO. 30boxes - promise you’ll never get big and fat and corrupt ;)
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:28 pm
they dont do it for other services like google widgets
look at this search for konfabulator
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Sorry N, but unless you’re going to start linking to Google Calendar whenever I pull up your blog, or whenever I use your webtop, you probably can’t complain.
Besides, I’d trust the market to correct itself. Remember pre-google, when Alta Vista was _the_ search engine? They started advertising their portal and free email, just like this but louder, and fell out of existence because people generally don’t like to be bombarded with ads.
January 3rd, 2007 at 4:11 pm
they may not do it for google widgets, but as blake ross and mike arrington both discuss, searches for “photo sharing” and “blogging” produce similar “Tips.”
to google: here’s a tip… don’t call it a “Tip.” hold yourself to the same standards you set up for everyone else and call it a “Sponsored Link.” you can even have your fancy google icon next to it, but don’t put it at the top of my search results without calling it what it is… an advertisement.
January 4th, 2007 at 11:26 am
gator! i had long forgotten about that customer support curse.
January 4th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/04/google-tips-pulled/
wow. you guys must pull some weight. or it’s just a coincidence…
January 4th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Just noticed it too: They have stopped surfacing tips! Funny, because I first learned about it here just two days ago, and now today I noticed the surfacing tips are gone. Bravo everyone!
January 4th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
With the whole Konfabulator vs. Widgets thing… I don’t think it was Google trying to be evil, just that anything with a “calendar” in it triggered a link to their product. Obviously Konfabulator does have the word “widget” in it so it’s not going to trigger the result. I don’t beleive a 30boxes query yielded a tip for the calendar. It’s only when you include the calendar part.
January 5th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Yes, good is evil.
January 6th, 2007 at 10:52 am
“this type of promotion runs counter to the standards that Google holds their advertisers to” - any advertiser can associate an ad to the keyword calendar.
“I am a savvy user who knows that typing a query in quotation marks yields a very specific response” - i learned long ago that strings in quotation marks are not the atomic unit one might expect. i would often be disgusted that hits for individual words show up in the results page when i quoted the string. i assume the adwords keyword matching is equally loose.
January 7th, 2007 at 1:53 am
If Google’s products cost anything, I’d feel a lot more irritated by the surfacing. Instead, it’s just a keyword based tie-in with another of their suite of products (”if you like x, you’ll LOVE y!”).
This seems similar to complaining if one searched for something on a weblog, and got the weblog’s pertinent posts above the results of a web crawl.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
It seems they have now dropped this devious advertising ploy! Glad to see the blosphere has made a valid change to what clearly is ‘below the belt’ policy.