cam macrae - blog

Meg weighs in on the ACCC's action against Trading Post and Google here.

The ACCC charges that Google doesn't "expressly distinguish advertisements from organic search results", a charge dismissed as spurious by many pundits including Ash Nallawalla.

After reading Meg's post, I'm not so certain the ACCC doesn't have a case.

In my experience, contextual text ads have a greater click through than banner ads. Whether this can be attributed to banner blindness is a matter of contention, but there is no doubt text ads integrate much more cleanly with the host site's content.

So too with search results - in Google's case the differentiator between organic and paid results is the "Sponsored Links" moniker, and optionally, a highlighted background.

As Meg points out, the term "Sponsored Links" links could be problematic for Google. Does a sponsored link infer some kind of endorsement? Was the term sponsored used because it appears significantly more benign that the alternative, say "Advertisement"?

For mine, the term "Advertisement" immediately detracts (perhaps subconsciously) from the authority and relevance of the paid link vs. the organic results. I'm sure this notion has not been lost on Google, and no doubt the term "Sponsored Links" has been chosen to deliberately muddy the waters.

The question of whether this is merely astute business practice or a violation of the Trade Practices Act will ultimate be answered by the Federal Court. Further, given the relative strength of Australian Trade Practices law when compared to that of many other nations, it remains to be seen if a ruling adverse to Google would actually have any knock-on effects in other markets.

Whatever the ruling in this particular case, it seems so long as Google continues to push the envelope it's lawyers (world over) will be spending a lot more time in court. If Google truly is the new Microsoft, I hope Google's internal beacon of innovation isn't similarly snuffed out as the lawyers take over.