Oogle Vs. Google

They say you can judge a person by which section of the Sunday Times he reads first. On that basis, this readers is moderately schizophrenic. It depends, but if I’m running out the door, and don’t wish to lug the whole shooting match with me, I’ll normally extract the magazine, the week in review, arts and entertainment, style, and the book review. If I’m feeling especially ambitious, i’ll bring a long the A section. At that point, it becomes obvious that I am passively declining the value of travel, sports, and business, which I don’t mean to do, but you know.

Yesterday, though, was an unusually crazy day and I had time for just two stories– Deborah Solomon’s bizarre interview with George and Barbara Bush’s personal chef, in the magazine; and an A1 business story that jumped to the ballast tanks of the business section. The latter story was one of the more comprehensive I’ve seen about Google, particularly the business end of the business. That is, how an idealistic little search engine company that had the best search algorithms in the world had the chutzpah to recognize that that asset could be leveraged into billions and billions of dollars in advertising revenue. How’d they do that? By returning paid advertisements with every search, thereby targeting ads to people who are specifically looking for information that an advertiser wants to provide, and may be in the best position to provide. Of course, the serious dough comes less from Google’s results pages themselves, and more from the colonization of all editorial content on the web. Thus, anytime the word “soda pop” appears on any page on the net where Google is serving ads, a Coca-Cola ad runs in the gutters (not an actual example). I’ve mentioned before that this is a sort of reverse product placement: A writer might innocently use the word “Nike” in a story about basketball, and Google serves an ad from the Nike coproation that runs adjacent to the story. That would never fly in the world of print, because it would be seen as discrediting the story; being adjacent to an advert, we assume that a nefarious, human being with a suitcase of snake oil was responsible for the hard sell. Not so with Google; we apparently see it as a blameless mechanical pairing. The massive servers at Google out in California are merely reacting to editorial content, never directing it.

Naturally, since Google now sells more ads than almost any other stand-alone media company, they must grow or die. The Times article mentioned that Google is looking at ways to extend into other media, and it’s an interesting thought that doesn’t get teased out very much. In particualr, reporter Saul Hansell writes,

Now Google is looking to expand its advertising into even more places. It is testing a plan to buy pages in magazines on which to place text ads.

I imagine that would look something like this: My magazine will publish yet another lengthy, fawning story on Nick Denton, which will refer ad nauseum to the amazing blogs Wonkette and Gawker and Fleshbot. Before we go to press, we will make our issue available to Google’s search spiders, and Google will buy adjacency advertising on behalf of Nick Denton. Maybe this even happens at the printer’s FTP site, to aquit everyone at the magazine from any direct involvement. We merely hold apage oipen for Google ads that will be eelectronically zapped into place.

(One interesting tangent made clear by Hansell’s piece was that Google’s insight was that simple, single-format text advertising–very much an electronic version of a small calssified ad–is what’s dridving this revolution, not huge splashy brand-driven display ads. This may result in an aesthetic evolution in advertising–a return to narrative and text-based ads. In other words, ads that people read rather than oogle.)

Ironically, the business section of the New York Times which celebrated the history and the putative, profitable future of Google also printed a full-page paid advertisement (not adjacent, by God)–by Google, looking for exceptional job candidates. Google executives obviously knew the story was coming, and probably even knew when it was coming, and they exercised their good sense and business acumen by capitalizing on the ersatz hyperlink. All those thousands of servers, and still the human genius for the sales pitch shines through.