Google Gets A Tag Line: “Search, Ads & Apps”

To my knowledge, Google never had a tag line. Yesterday, it announced it had gained one: "Search, Ads & Apps." But wasn’t the tag line "Don’t Be Evil?" Or wasn’t it something about organizing the world’s information? Come along, and I’ll try to sort it out. Google has a mission page, and the long-standing stated […]

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To my knowledge, Google never had a tag line. Yesterday, it announced it had
gained one: "Search, Ads & Apps." But wasn’t the tag line "Don’t Be Evil?" Or
wasn’t it something about organizing the world’s information? Come along, and
I’ll try to sort it out.

Google has a mission page, and
the long-standing stated mission is:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.

That mission statement has never been used as a tag line, something you’d
associate with the Google logo to explain what Google does. It has been the
shorthand way Google has described itself, however.

Google also has what it
calls
an "informal" corporate motto:

Don’t be evil

As for a tag line, as I said, Google’s never had one that I know of. Reuters

reports
that it has now gained one:

Google Inc.’s corporate tagline has become "Search, Ads and Apps,"
reflecting a shift beyond search and advertising into online software
applications, its chief executive said on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters at the company’s headquarters ahead of Google’s
annual shareholder meeting, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said his presentation
to investors on Thursday afternoon would focus on the three parts of its
business.

That formalizes what Schmidt had hinted at earlier this year in a Wired
interview, though at least it keeps search in the mix. I was disappointed about
that being missing, as I
wrote earlier:

The "we’re a tech company" charade is over from the very top, with CEO Eric
Schmidt finally calling Google recently in a Wired

interview
"an advertising company." As for the
mission "to organize the
world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," that’s not
even listed in the four ways we’re told by him to think of Google:

  1. An advertising company
  2. An end-user system (to me, a combination operating system/super office
    suite of software)
  3. A giant supercomputer
  4. A social phenomenon

Back in 2005, I
complained
that the Google philosophy page had yet to reflect how Google had changed:

At the very least, the entire second point of the "Ten things Google has
found to be true" items on that Our Philosophy page should go. That’s:

It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

That thing is supposedly "Google does search," but Blogger is search?
Google Talk is search? AdSense is search?
Selling print
ads
is search? Even if you buy into all of these being search, can so many
different products and services be considered "one thing?"

I guess the tag line is part of that catching up process. But so far, no
appearance of the tag line on the Google site that I can see.

Postscript: Google tells me:

We are not using “Search, Ads & Apps” as a formal corporate tag line nor associating it with our logo. For details, give a listen to Eric Schmidt’s remarks on this subject during the stockholders meeting yesterday.

Postscript 2: Google Press Day 2007 Q&A With CEO Eric Schmidt covers how in June, Eric Schmidt again used this tagline as — well, a tagline. So with respect to Google PR, Search Engine Land is deeming it as an official tagline.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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