A Dell PC with Google Inside and on AOL it's You've Got Google. Will the State of Michigan sign a deal to add the Google Start Page to every official website from the DMV to the Dept. of Ed?
In the Dell deal Google is offering to pay a dollar to install Google Search Tools on each PC and once you or I do a Google search on our new Dell PC a click-through will cause a Web-Service to transfer $.75 from Google's Offshore Bank to Dell's Hedge Fund.
I really don't think any cash will trade hands, Dell is an advertiser on Google, a large portion of Google's revenue over the past few years must have come from Dell. Just Google Tablet PC….
Google needs our trust more then it needs Dell Desktops and the AOL Homepage. When searching for something we want to find the best result not the one that gave the backhander. The quest for knowledge cannot be satisfied with a paid advertisement and the question with Google is whether it's all about product placement.
I had an experience with Google last July that got my attention. I wrote a post on July 27 and within 24 hours it climbed to the top five on Google for the search; Windows Vista beta. That evening there were thousands of computer enthusiasts looking for the Windows Vista beta bits and they clicked on my blog at a rate of over a thousand an hour. I watched my logs move faster then my electric meter, it was an amazing blogger moment.
I went to bed a happy man, because I had recently placed ads in my feed with so many sites syndicating my content and placing it along side their Google ads. The next morning I went straight to my Community Server logs and was stunned to discover that the torrent of traffic had stopped. I Googled Windows Vista beta and saw that I had dropped from the top 10, next page, top 20, next page, top 30, next page, top 40 and after a while came the Russian language pages then the Chinese but not a sign of my post!
The previous evening people were coming to my blog to get the beta bits for Windows Vista, but I didn't have the bits just a link to the MSDN site where a subscription is needed to download. None of the other sites in Google's search result for Windows Vista beta had the bits either, but most of them had Google ads and I did not.
Many of my posts reach the top 5 on Google after 48 hours, I have had my link with greatness and a deeply personal post. On the evening of July 28, 2005 someone from Google interceded with a ref=nofollow, but I did manage to earn over $900 in ad revenue in just a few hours. If I had Google ads who knows what I might have earned in a weeks time in the top 5 on a hot topic.
So Google can shine it's light on you and drive revenue or leave out the answer everybody's searching for. I'll be attending Search Engine Strategies in NYC in a few weeks and hope we can have a serious conversation with Google about trust, all we want is the best result.
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