Stepping on Giants’ Toes: Google’s Conflict of Interest in Advertising
One of the largest contributors to Google’s success has been its ability to auction off ad slots for related products at the top of search result pages. This has allowed Google to rake in billions of dollars over the past decade and pushed it to the forefront of search engine technology and big data analytics. The creation of Google’s ad slot auction system as made Google the largest and most influential advertising platform in the world. With all this success, Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) has started branching into other industries such as cellphone and streaming device manufacturing, among many other hardware categories. Alphabet Inc now buys its own advertising slots at the top of Google search result pages to promote their own products, giving Google products like the Pixel cellphone and Nest smart thermostat an edge against competitors.
A study done by the Wall Street Journal found that hardware products made by Google and other Alphabet Inc subsidiaries appeared in the top ad slot of 91% of 25,000 recent searches related to these products. Furthermore, in 43% of searches, the top two advertising slots were taken by Google products. According to the Wall Street Journal, “all 1,000 searches for ‘laptops’ started with a Chromebook ad,” and almost all Google searches for phones were led by a couple ads for Google Pixel phones. With this much control over the products consumers view, it’s a real mystery that Google Glass was such a flop. When the Wall Street Journal showed its findings to Google, within days, most of the biased ads disappeared from search results. Google declined to comment on this strange development. After being exposed for corrupting multiple tech hardware markets, it is possible that Google decided to pull back its ruthless ad campaign because it knows that its strength has always been web search optimization and sponsored search advertising. They realized that it was not worth the effort to jeopardize their trust with businesses and customers all over the world who use their marketing platform just to promote a couple minor products.
Source:
Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-uses-its-search-engine-to-hawk-its-products-1484827203