May 14, 2008

I'll comment as I did on Sphinn here:
http://sphinn.com/story/46093#c41904

I can appreciate the irony, but to be fair, this isn't apple to oranges.

First, that's not a "Google Checkout" box that's appear. It's Google Shopping results, like here. Just like regular Google web search, you have paid and unpaid results in shopping. Notice in that link I gave how there are no paid results.

Now that box showing up in Google's web search results that's "promoting" particular vodka sellers? That's just Google Universal Search integrating the unpaid results from shopping search. Google's not selling those products, nor are they being advertised.

If you want to consider unpaid listings as advertisements, then a general search for vodka on Google should bring up no merchants in the unpaid results at all, right? But that's not the case -- and hasn't ever been the case despite the no ads policy being in place. So what's the news now? Nothing has changed -- in fact, we've even had shopping results inserted even before Universal Search just like now.

You could argue that if Google wants to ban things in ads, they should ban the same things in editorial results. But Google's never claimed to be consistent here, when I've talked to them about it in the past. Some things they don't want ads for (some things they also by law can't take ads for), and that's it.

I suppose you could also argue that aside from Google Shopping, there's the completely separate Google Checkout payment system, and Google shouldn't allow vodka or alcohol to be sold through that system. But that might be the case already. I haven't checked there terms, but if I restrict a vodka search on shopping to just merchants that sell also through Google Checkout, I only seem to get things like books and posters

I think those aren't ads. Google just shows a regular Froogle OneBox and a link that restricts those results to products that could be bought using Checkout.

That's Product Search/Froogle items, not Checkout. Click the Checkout link and I bet you won't see actual vodka items.

Frank - I have comfirmation that the listing is not a Checkout promotion but instead a Universal Search Result - Matt

Yeah, sorry but that is definitely not Adwords. If it had been Adwords, Google would have banned it already. As alex said it certainly is a Product Search (aka Google Base) where you can promote ecommerce and use Google Checkout to facilitate transactions on the web and have products searchable. So it is certainly not a Google Checkout promo, it is a results listing that is displayed relevant to a keyword that is also a product or item in their Products database. Jumped the gun a bit there...

I don't think Frank jumped the gun, because he didn't say it was AdWords. not sure where you got that Paul, perhaps you should read more carefully before "questioning the authoritay" of the tank. :)

I agree that there is a bit of inconsistency here. It is surprising that one can advertise selling liquor in Google Products and not AdWords. As someone commented in the Sphinn discussion linked above, you can search for "buy rum" or "buy vodka" and it's pretty clearly an ad to buy those products.

There are a lot more weird things Google does, but what can we do about it? The only thing we can do about this, is complain about the fact that Google uses her own website for making money. When Google overdoes this, people will go to another Search Engine.

Google's "own" website? You mean a few words Google, logo, and copyright notice + the publishers' content?