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January 17, 2007
Google Promotes Google Checkout on Home Page
There have been a number of recent reports about Google according their offerings privileged visibility over competing services even if they are not necessarily the best in their class. Ordinarily I would think it's logical for a company to promote its own products. Google, though, has unfortunately set itself up for all the flak it is getting because of its insistence on user experience to the point of an evangelistic creed.
I was surprised then to find that Google defiled its home page, that Helen of Web pages that inspired a thousand pages like itself, with a promotion of its own Checkout product. Without a doubt, Google has worked hard and earned the right to promote its own product on the most heavily viewed page in the world. Is it in the best interests of its users though, to have yet another link on that formerly pristine Google home page?
Google may have promised never to advertise anything on its front page that is not relevant; they clarified this position in their response to this unaffiliated page. Then came the advertisements for the Google Search toolbar, which I tolerated because at least they are search related. After all, when arriving at a search home page, seeing an ad for a search tool is not all that irrelevant.
Putting a Google Checkout promo on the front page is something else though. Although Google won't release exact numbers, it is fair to estimate that end users of Google outnumber advertisers by a factor of 1000 to 1. Is it really relevant to subject all visitors to google.com to a product promotion when at most 0.1% are in its target market?
Google is facing competition from competing ad platforms as well as from users who have wised up enough not to click on an online ad. I can see why they are more aggressive about putting pointers to their products on search result pages. Heck, even the tips fracas isn't as bad as this, because at the end of the day you can argue for its relevance to the user's search query. An unnecessary Checkout promo on the Google home page can point to only two things: either Google cares less about its front page user experience, or Google Checkout is doing badly. Or is it both?
[Update: I was wrong about assuming that the target of the above promotion were Google's advertisers. The promotion is indeed aimed at its users. Still, waving $10 at users to get their credit card information when they just want to find some information on the web is distracting and not relevant to their intent. And if I eyeballed the above and got annoyed with my assessment, albeit a mistaken one, why wouldn't others?]
Posted by Vishy at January 17, 2007 03:49 PM