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Google vs. eBay: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

June 20, 2007

As many of you know, Google and eBay are not on the best of terms right now. At the recent eBay Live event in Boston, some Googlers tried to crash eBay’s party by holding their own Google Checkout Freedom Party to persuade Paypal users to switch to Google Checkout. (The party was since cancelled.) However, the damage was done. eBay pulled its Google ads on AdWords, which resulted in losses for Google of $26 million monthly (or $312 million annually).

Truthfully, the situation is a mess. As many people said, it was very unprofessional of Google to hold their own party in the vicinity of the competition.

The google protest party is in pretty bad taste. Very unlike them..

Google was doing just fine with eBay’s competition. eBay was doing just fine without Google’s competition. All in all, they coexisted and the world was a happy place.

And then this happened.

But what about its aftermath? After eBay had its rift with Google, its traffic actually went up. Bill Tancer of Hitwise confirms this fact, but then says something rather substantial:

25% of eBays search traffic from Google (and thats just the top 5 words) comes from brand, domain or navigational searches for eBay (e.g. “ebay,” “ebay.com” “www.ebay.com”).

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Google Needs to Screen Ad Purchasers More Closely

April 26, 2007

Earlier this morning, I reported on Search Engine Roundtable that Google users are becoming infected with malware after clicking on Sponsored Listings. The problem was discovered on April 10th. Another victim of a similar Google AdWords hack reported the issue on April 23rd.

Yesterday, I also addressed a consistent concern about irrelevant Google AdSense ads. This problem is a lot more prevalent. The URLs don’t necessarily take users to the desired location. I suppose the paid search experience, even with a Quality Score, is just not as good as the organic search experience for some terms.

It’s April 26th and there’s a definite need for a very involved human element to be introduced into assessing the reliability of sponsored listings. Minutes ago, I noticed via TheGoogleCache that there’s a definite problem with sponsored results displaying totally useless information.

I was able to reproduce the problem too. Take a look and see for yourself:

What's with these Google Sponsored Listings?

As more and more people find the way to monetize, more and more people find ways to exploit monetization. With the billions of dollars Google invests in advertising, it would be a wonderful thing if they got it down pat algorithmically. But until then, there should be a many more pairs of eyes working to ensure that surfer experience is enhanced from a paid perspective.

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Google: Too Many Ads, Too Little Real Estate

November 5, 2006

Newspaper AdvertisementsGoogle has run out of room for its advertisements. Despite the Internet having over 100 million websites, I guess the real estate is too precious (and not everyone has opted to have ads appear on their websites), causing the search engine giant to look towards other means of getting their money in advertisements: printed media.

But hold on a second — I don’t actually read the paper! And if these advertisers really wanted to publish their ads in the newspaper, newspapers did come first, after all, so wouldn’t they have thought of this method of advertising already?

Unfortunately, I think that advertising on print media will miss a huge demographic of individuals just like me who prefer to read about newsworthy items online. I know that while statistics show that newspapers are still preferred to online media, this figure is likely to continue changing as everything becomes seemingly more “centralized.” I know that I’m doing a lot more things online — such as buying groceries and drug items, and if my neighbors asking me about drugstore.com is any indication that they’re considering trying it out, I’m sure the transition will continue going towards the ease and convenience of doing things online.

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