Getting it Wrong

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.

email: doc@ssc.com