Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:
Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger
It seems to be triggered by any use of the word "blog" in a search. For me, all of these will make it come up:
By making this a tip rather than promoting Blogger in ad units, Google avoids the entire debate of whether it pays for its ads fairly or not (it recently said it does; last year after similar reassurances, I still found I had a ton of questions I may yet follow up on for answers).
Personally, I’ve got no problem with the tip. As I’ve written, I want Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren’t
to lose a spot to Google itself.
Don’t forget, Blogger does sounds like it has some pretty handy new features. Find the rundown on the official Blogger blog here.
Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes Google Calendar has been promoted this way before.
Related Topics: Google: Blogger | Google: Marketing
Danny, the “Calendar” tip is also new (as far as we know). However, Google did something similar before for some time already when you searched for e.g. “image”, but without any icon to the tip. You’ll get this:
“Tip: Looking for pictures? Try Google Images”
It doesn’t really avoid the debate of ‘Google advertising on Google’ when they still advertise even with the ‘tip’ hard coded into results.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=blog&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
So thats 3 spots they have on that SERP…