Google not evil, but unfair

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February 13th, 2008 by Click Consult

As we all know, Google's informal corporate motto is “DON'T BE EVIL”. We could argue day and night about what not being evil means, but opinions never bring consensus nor solution – I prefer to look at facts, for example Google's own policies.

Let's start with DOUBLE SERVING.
As one of my colleagues has mentioned before, when it comes to company profits or growth, the means are not a choice but the way. This policy was created to give each one of the advertisers a fair portion of sponsored links, sort of CC (Competition Committee).

But if we look closer, we can see that “agencies buy two or more similar domain names, create two or more slightly different websites, and then sets up two or more AdWords campaigns for these websites” (according to Mr. B. 01.02.08).
The example bellow is taken from Google PPC ads:

Another of Google’s policy forbids UNNECESSARY CAPITALIZATION in ad texts, only the first letter can be capitalized. But as we can see from the Tesco ad below, which is the only sponsored ad displayed, it’s not always true:

According to Google editorial, REPETITION IN AD TEXT IS NOT ALLOWED, but the case below proves completely opposite. Google was informed about this evaluation around a month and a half ago, but the ad is still there.

So what's the conclusion?
On one hand, we could say that some advertisers are working on principal “not caught, not a thief”, which is very pitiful, as they risk their reputation for possibility to make quick bucks.
On the other hand, why can’t Google create a simple algorithm to enforce their own rules?

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