Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ (Jan 19, 2017)

This is a really fantastic bit of a analysis commissioned by the Wall Street Journal. It found that for 91% of searches relating to top consumer electronics categories, a Google or Nest product was in the top ad slot above the results, and in 43% it had the top two slots. This is Google competing with its own advertisers, and Google apparently was so taken aback by the analysis that it tweaked its strategy when the WSJ spoke to Google about it, and the numbers are now much lower. Google’s hardware push therefore not only puts it in conflict with its OEMs, but also with its biggest customers – advertisers. I’m intrigued to know how other big consumer electronics brands feel about this, but the challenge of course is that they have few alternatives – Google dominates search, and so it also has a dominant position in pitching its own products. There’s a close analogy here to Amazon’s hawking of its hardware on Amazon.com, but competitors know what they’re getting into there to a greater extent.

via Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ

The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

• Alphabet
• Google
• Nest

• Advertising
• E-commerce

• Google's Hardware Push

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