The page explains that Google wants to create a panel of people to help it “learn more about how everyday people use the Internet.” It explains that panel members have to be at least 13 years old, have (or sign up for) a Google account and use the Chrome web browser. They also have to be willing to let Google track their web surfing activity:

As a panelist, you’ll add a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them. What we learn from you, and others like you, will help us improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone.

In exchange for that, panel members get a $5 Amazon gift card code for installing the browser extension, and then can earn another $5 Amazon code for every three months that they continue in the Screenwise program. The sign-up page advertises a $25 max total payment, but the fine print says Google will decide later what payment, if any, will be given for panelists who continue longer than a year.

Amazon isn’t involved in the promotion; Google says it’s using the online research firm Knowledge Networks as its “panel management partner” for Screenwise.

The timing of this program seems odd, especially considering the backlash that Google has faced over the upcoming changes to its privacy policy. Even though this Screenwise program is completely opt-in, some critics are bound to question why Google needs more data about web searchers and the websites they visit.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information about the Screenwise panel/program and we’ll update this article if we learn more.

(tip via @centernetworks)

Postscript, February 8: Google has replied to us with this official statement about the Screenwise program:

“Like many other web and media companies, we do panel research to help better serve our users by learning more about people’s media use, on the web and elsewhere. This panel is one such small project that started near the beginning of the year. Of course, this is completely optional to join. People can choose to participate if it’s of interest (or if the gift appeals) and everyone who does participate has complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel. People can stay on the panel as long as they’d like, or leave at any time.”

Postscript #2, February 8: It appears this isn’t the only piece of Google’s Screenwise program. As Ars Technica has learned, there’s a more extensive version of the program in which web surfers participate by installing a “high-end router” called the Screenwise Data Collector.

Ars Technica has several images of the signup process and legalese for the Screenwise program, including this shot of the data collection device.

(image via Ars Technica)

This version of Screenwise pays better: $100 on signup, plus $20 per month up to one year’s involvement.

The legalese also reveals that Google may share the data it collects with “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers and programming networks,” in addition to sharing it with Knowledge Networks, the program’s manager. Google says that “generally” its data won’t be linked to individual users, but it “may share anonymized individual-level Panelist data with academic research institutions.” It also says that “Google will attempt to remove personally identifiable information before sharing Panel Data with third parties.”

The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

One possible explanation is that a lot of people bought new PC computers over the holidays, and Internet Explorer’s market share grew in January because it’s the default browser there. But that didn’t happen a year ago; in January 2011, Explorer’s market share declined nearly a full percent. (IE did gain in February, 2011, as shown above.)

Net Applications ties Explorer’s gain and Chrome’s decline to the Google penalty which removed Chrome from search results for a number of browser-related search terms. Google penalized Chrome in early January after the company’s own botched sponsored blog post campaign ran afoul of Google’s search/webmaster guidelines.

In my searches this morning, the main Chrome page doesn’t appear on page one for “browser,” “web browser,” “download web browser,” “chrome,” “google chrome” nor “chrome browser.” I’m not sure that’s why Chrome’s market share dropped in January, but it’s an interesting theory to consider at minimum.

(tip via Computerworld)

Google said even though it felt there were no “remaining violations” of its guidelines, the search engine’s spam fighting team was going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page, which in turn lead to today’s ranking decrease.

From the statement Google sent us:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.

We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Lower PageRank Value Doesn’t Equal Banning

At the time the statement was originally sent, around 1:30 PT today, the page had a publicly-reported PageRank value of 9. The highest you can have is 10.

One tool I used reported the non-https version of the page as having a PageRank of zero. Another check with the Google Toolbar shows it still at 9. However, it’s common that PageRank values shown to the public may be behind, sometimes months behind, the scores that Google is actually using.

Lowering the PageRank value is not the same as removing or banning the page from Google. Potentially, however, a lower PageRank value will reduce its ability to rank well for certain terms. That’s what’s happened as a result of this.

Will It Still Rank?

When the statement was initially received, the Chrome home page still ranked for searches on chrome, google chrome and the generic term of browser, as you can see below:

I wrote in the earlier version of this story:

Chances are, even with the PageRank reduction, the page will continue to rank for these terms. However, if it were to fall out of the first page of results for “browser,” or to something lower than its current number two position that I see, then the penalty will have had some real teeth….

If that penalty doesn’t cause some type of ranking reduction, then it’s not really much of a penalty at all. The separate issue of Google’s campaign creating garbage posts remains, but that’s a penalty that’s typically applied to the garbage post themselves.

No, It Will Not

Now that has happened for a search on “browser,” as you can see below:

That’s the first page of results for “browser” on Google now. Previously, Chrome has been ranked number two. Now you have to go to the fifth page of results to find it, ranked in position 50:

NOTE: Only about a half-hour after writing this, we’ve also seen the page sink to as low at 73.

In fact, the page no longer ranks for “chrome” or for “chrome browser,” either. Instead, of the Chrome home page that looked like this showing up first:

It’s the Chrome installation help page that gets top billing:

The main download page does still make it in the top results, but it has been demoted in both cases to “sitelink” status as you can see here:

John Doherty emailed me that he’d run some ranking checks on other terms before the change happened. Here’s the shift from what he recorded to what I see now:

• internet browser, dropped from 5th to 58th
• web browser, dropped from 4th to 54th

A Solid Slap

Overall, only one page in the sponsored post campaign was ever spotted with a “straight” link that passed credit to the Chrome page. It also didn’t seem as if the campaign overall was designed to help Chrome rank for any particular terms. It was doing fine on its own before this happened.

But technically, even that single link was enough to make Google guilty of buying paid links, even if it happened because of two different agencies being involved. Minor technical violation or not, I’d say Google applied a solid penalty against itself, one that should last for at least 60 days.

But If Google Can’t Figure Things Out…

To me, the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage content that was produced by the campaign, “thin” material that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results. I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.

Given how much detail Google professes to put into its marketing, as I covered yesterday, it still remains amazing that the company found itself involved with this type of campaign.

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

I hate to write that, because the last thing I want is for a Google screw-up to be an excuse for anyone to do the type of “marketing” that Google did. But it’s also true.

Postscript: The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has shared some comments on Google+ though he’s on vacation. He confirms that the video player links didn’t pass any link credit, but because they found at least one non-video player link that did, that was deemed sufficient to take action against Google. From his post:

If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Related Articles

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• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
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Google: We Only Meant To Buy Online Ads

Google has sent me this statement:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

That seems odd, at first, because it has become clear that Google was behind a campaign that paid bloggers to promote its Chrome product. Otherwise, the web wouldn’t be littered with all these posts that say “This post sponsored by Google.”

Essence Digital: Google Thought They Were Buying Video Ads

The email I received from Google also pointing to a statement from Essence Digital, a New York/London digital media agency. The statement:

There’s been some recent attention in the news involving a Google campaign (see linked article). Here’s some context on what happened.

We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.

In other words, Google seems to have contracted with Essence Digital to have a video ad campaign be run across the web. Apparently, Google had no idea how Essence Digital was going to actually run the campaign or make the video ads appear across the web.

Why Did Google Need An Outside Firm To Buy Video Ads?

Why Google needed an agency to do this for them is really weird, since Google’s own video ad network is a pretty effective way to place video ads across the web and in far more places that this campaign did.

So, a big question here remains: what exactly did Essence Digital promise to Google? What was so compelling about its pitch that Google wanted to go for it?

Unruly: We Didn’t Ask For Links & Don’t Care About Them

Meanwhile, as best I can tell, Essence Digital didn’t actually implement the campaign. Instead, video promotion company Unruly was used, as I suspected when writing my story last night. Unruly’s been in touch with me to say:

As Andrew Girdwood points out, Unruly never requires bloggers to link to back to an advertiser’s site. That’s because we’re in the business of video advertising not search engine marketing, so we couldn’t care less about link juice. We don’t ask for it, we don’t pay for it, and we don’t track it.

In line with FTC and EU regulation Unruly always requires that bloggers clearly disclose any post, tweet, or other reference to the video as being sponsored and we provide guidance on how to do this. We also request that if they do link anywhere they use nofollow, both because that’s best practice and also because it’s in their own interest to do so.

Unruly is committed to an ethical, legal, and totally transparent approach to online marketing. It’s crucial that posts are clearly marked as sponsored and that links are marked as nofollow. And it’s crucial that opinions belong to the author, which is why we never push an angle or opinion, and also why, occasionally, bloggers will unfortunately pen a post that deviates from our guidelines, as here. Where that happens, we’re very happy to have it pointed out and will cure the infraction as fast as possible.

As I said in the story, I didn’t expect that Unruly would ask bloggers to link to the site. No smart company trying to buy links would do that, hoping instead that it would just happen naturally.

Unruly Doesn’t Care About “Link Juice” But Has Terms About PageRank?

However, to say that “we couldn’t care less about link juice” is obviously not true. In Unruly’s terms and conditions, as I wrote about yesterday, there’s this statement:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached;

There’s no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google’s own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice. But a comment from my earlier post from who seems to be Unruly CEO Scott Button addresses this:

On the reference to PageRank in our Ts&Cs, Unruly uses a number of data sources and statistical techniques, that may include PageRank checks, to protect our advertisers from low quality video views. These measures are in place to protect the revenues of high quality sites and to ensure that views of the video represent genuine user interest – they have nothing to with search engine marketing

OK, but it’s hard to argue that Google was delivered high-quality views from the campaign that was just run, I’d say. Also interesting, I’m virtually certain this section of the Unruly terms was added after my story was posted:

where you write an editorial post linking to or embedding a Branded Video any links within this post or associated with it which link to the Advertiser’s website need to be marked with a ‘nofollow’ tag in accordance with Google guidelines. Any infraction of this rule may result in any payment being suspended or withheld.

I don’t recall seeing this yesterday, because I did a keyword search against this page for both nofollow and Google. I found nothing about nofollow mentioned (otherwise, I’d have written about that). I did find a mention about Google, but only the single one that I noted. The Internet Archive also shows that this wasn’t part of the page last year.

It might be that Unruly, in this particular campaign, wasn’t concerned about gathering up link credit. I’d certainly agree that was probably not the intention.

But in other campaigns, with terms like that, it suggests that Unruly is trying to buying links. That sort of means that Google is potentially doing business with the same type of drug dealer it’s trying to put out of business, though it has an intermediary involved.

JavaScript Might Not Block Link Credit

Unruly also did an interview with AllThingsD, talking about, as in the statement I received, that no one is asked to link, but if they do, they’re asked to use nofollow. Further, the company said, “All links from the video player are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings.”

As I covered in my earlier story, wrapping links in Javascript doesn’t necessarily block credit from being passed (and see also here). Only Google can really tell us what the situation is. So, we’re waiting for Google’s spam team to weigh in (which might be delayed, as I know that the head of that team, Matt Cutts, is currently on vacation).

I’m hoping to see both the exact instructions that the bloggers were given, as well as learning more about what exactly Google thought it was buying. It’s likely there’s plenty of wiggle room for Google to claim that if any paid links did end up being purchased, it wasn’t its fault — an excuse that hasn’t saved others from penalties like JC Penney, so the Google Chrome page might still face a ban.

Biggest Issue Remains: Garbage Content

The bigger issue in all this, as I wrote before, is that the campaign produced a lot of garbage content. That doesn’t mean that Google Chrome gets banned. Rather, it’s just embarrassing to Google, when it has been busy trying to prevent this type of content from ranking in its own search engine.

Postscript: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

Related Articles

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• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
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• Google’s Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year
• Google & Bing Have “Won A Major Victory” Over Content Farms, Study Says
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

“This Post Sponsored By Google”

Aaron Wall wrote about the campaign today at SEO Book, spotting how a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” brings back over 400 pages written apparently as part of a Google marketing campaign:

We’re checking with Google for confirmation that the company is behind the campaign, but expect a response to be delayed, as Google’s PR department, like much of Google, is off today. But it certainly appears to be Google-backed.

Google Buys Links

The campaign is odd in two major ways. For one, it potentially violates Google’s guidelines against paid links.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn’t be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm.

And yet here, we see one of Google’s sponsored post doing exactly that:

The arrow points to a link leading to the Google Chrome download page. This is a straight link, not blocked with nofollow. It only appears in this post because the post is part of a sponsored campaign by Google, as noted at the bottom of the page. Therefore, both the author and Google itself are in violation of Google’s guidelines and risk being banned by Google.

The video itself is also a link. It’s not hosted on YouTube, nor does clicking on it bring up a video page. Instead, it leads to the Google Chrome download page, through a JavaScript link that Google would understand.

Will Google Ban Google Chrome?

Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue. In 2009, Google penalized Google Japan for its own search results for the same issue, not removing it but reducing its ability to rank for 11 months.

Potentially, all this means that Google will have to ban the Google Chrome download page over paid links. That would suck for Google, since it’s busy running ads for Google Chrome, which will in turn prompt people to search for it. Right now, the page appears at the top of results for searches on google chrome:

A ban would make it disappear for anything from a month to a year, based on how Google’s handled past penalties.

From the posts that I’ve reviewed, most do not seem to have links to Google or the Google Chrome page. In addition, I expect that Google probably never instructed anyone to directly link to anything.

The campaign — most likely run by third-party Unruly, based on where the video is hosted and handy if Google wants to pass the blame — probably had instructions that just said people should write about whatever they want, positive or negative, with the only requirement being that the Chrome video be included as part of their post.

Google’s Garbage Content Campaign

That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

Consider the post above that I highlighted, which says:

Having a small business, I have found Google to be a key element in getting my business out to the online community. I have put so much money into advertisements and at the end of the day, my analytics show that Google is still the top referrer to my business. That has said a lot to me and I started to invest a lot of time into SEO. If you do your SEO it right on your website, Google will propel your business to another level. As a small business, my voice is bigger and better because of Google. It takes me from just being a local business to working with clients world wide.

What’s that got to do with the purported focus of this post: “Google Chrome Helping Small Business.” The author is saying nothing about how Google Chrome has helped her business or any business she knows of. Instead, Chrome only gets mentioned at the end, with text that seems pretty boilerplate to this campaign:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Avoid These “Reviews” Of Google Chrome

A different post is entitled “Review: Google Chrome” and says:

I wanted to share a quick note on Google Chrome; more specifically, I want to share how it can change your small business. It is no secret that there are endless ways to expand your small businesses; however, what is the best way to accomplish that? These days, it’s hard to know who to trust, but with the name Google, you know you are in good hands. I am sure most of you are familiar, but check out this video! It will inspire you to do more.

Ready for that in-depth review? Here it comes:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Fortunately, if you search for “google chrome review,” that post doesn’t make it into the top results. However, consider this search for google chrome benefits:

Imagine you’re someone trying to understand the benefits to using Google Chrome versus other browsers. Out of 21 million possible matches, two of Google’s sponsored garbage posts make it into the top ten results. Here’s what one of the top ranked posts says:

“The Benefits Of Google Chrome,” the post is entitled. And those benefits?

The Internet has many wonderful tools for helping us save money. There are great blogs written by passionate people teaching us how to use coupons effectively. There are budgeting tools to assist us with maintaining a healthy financial life. There are small businesses who are available to provide quality products made locally. Whatever financial information it is you are looking for, you are bound to find it on the Internet. And Google Chrome can help you.

See anything there that’s Chrome-specific? I mean, Internet Explorer and Firefox could help you with all of these things, as well. So what are the unique benefits that Google Chrome will provide, from this author’s experience and knowledge?

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Ah, yes, that boilerplate text and video again.

Here’s what another post in the top results says:

The opening paragraph has 295 words generally about saving money and finding those who want to save money. None of it is about Google Chrome until you get to the last sentence, with 35 words that say:

This is where Google Chrome comes in, they offer a way for small businesses to get started easily and get their business name in to the online and social media world without spending a fortune.

After that, there’s no review of Chrome’s features. There’s no review of how Chrome can actually be used by small businesses. There’s just the standard copy about that Vermont business and the video.

The Video Isn’t Even About Chrome

How about the video itself that Google’s pushing? You may have seen on television already. It has nothing to do even with how Chrome actually helped the Vermont flour producer featured, King Arthur Flour, succeed. Here, watch it yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since King Arthur Flour has been online since at least December 2006, I’m willing to bet it got its start through the Internet Explorer browser. It sure wasn’t Chrome, which didn’t exist at the time.

By the way, while the company’s Google+ page gets featured in the ad, it’s not important enough to King Arthur Flour to be featured on its home page alongside the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, as you can see on the right.

So what have we got? Google’s paid for a content-light post that’s not a review of Google Chrome, nor a review of how Google Chrome helps small business, pushing a video that also doesn’t show how Google Chrome helps small businesses.

Perhaps Google’s Ads Need Less Emotion & More Quality

Ironically, the New York Times had a great article today talking about how Google is working harder than ever to advertise itself, in particular to help promote Chrome. From the article:

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Actually, Google makes me want to cry for all the wrong reasons, such as an ad about Google Chrome that never explains what the hell Google Chrome is. Maybe that’s all about the curiosity Google’s trying to push:

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’ ”

If they don’t get out of bed thinking they need a new browser, there’s a good chance they don’t even think about what browser they currently use. So perhaps an ad that actually does explain the product features of Chrome might be more useful.

At the very least, if you’re going to do a sponsored post campaign, then make the posts have content that also explain the product, not a campaign that produces posts that violate your own content guidelines. Because when I read in the New York Times about the care taken to pick tablecloths for the Google Zeitgeist event for advertisers:

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Then this type of campaign feels like those linen tablecloths that Google wanted to avoid, sloppy and dirty.

Postscript: I heard back from one a blogger I contacted who had done one of these posts. She told me that she’d heard about the campaign through the SITS Girls community. After some searching, I can see that two pay-per-post campaigns run by Unruly have been offered there. One was for the American Cancer Society; the other for T-Mobile.

Both asked that bloggers watch a video and decide if they wanted to do a post about it, saying whatever they wanted, and embed the video on their blog. Payment was $40 in Amazon gift card credit for each. I can’t find that a Google campaign was offered this way, but it seems identical to the other campaigns that the community runsin conjunction with Unruly.

Also, the sign-up terms on the Unruly site have this interesting section:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached; or

These are general terms and might not apply to this particular campaign that Unruly appears to have run on behalf of Google. But regardless, it suggests that Unruly is indeed running campaigns with the intention of gaining better search rankings through paid links.

I say this because there is absolutely no other reason to link payment to the Google PageRank of a site unless you are trying to influence rankings.

Postscript 2: See our follow-up story, Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For.

Postscript 3: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

Related Articles

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
• Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• Google’s Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year
• Google & Bing Have “Won A Major Victory” Over Content Farms, Study Says
• Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

(Stock image courtesy of Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Firefox With Bing

In a blog post today, Bing invites people to download a version of “Firefox With Bing” where Bing is used as the default search engine for the Firefox search box and for searches conducted from the “AwesomeBar” address window:

In most countries, Firefox uses Google as its default search engine, thanks to a deal between Google and Firefox. Until last year, Bing wasn’t even an alternative option offered within the browser.

Bing: Any Browser Is A Good Browser

A Bing-Firefox deal last year finally fixed that issue. But today’s news is something entirely in its own league, a Microsoft division encouraging people to download a rival product of another division.

But it’s that type of attitude that I wrote in 2008 Microsoft needed to take, if it wanted to really win in search:

For Microsoft to succeed in search, I want them to forget how search integrates with Windows or Internet Explorer (sidenote: after being integrated in various ways for a decade now, clearly that’s not going to be a Google-killing tactic). Forget how search might tie into Office. Use Macs. Use Firefox. Hell, use Google Chrome. I want search products that succeed on their own.

Defaults Aren’t What You Assume

By the way, Bing is not the default in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as some people assume. To my understanding, it’s the default only where it has done deals with hardware manufacturers or in the rare case when Internet Explorer is installed on a “clean” computer with no prior operating system.

As for Google’s Chrome, Google has usually been the default there, unless you install Chrome on a computer where Google is not already the default in another browser. In those cases, it typically has asked if you want to change to Google search.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that on Apple computers, installing Chrome causes it to deliberately ask if you want to use Google, Yahoo or Bing. This has happened to me twice in the past two weeks. Potentially, the same is now happening on Windows computers. I just haven’t done any installs on them, recently.

For related news on the topic, see Techmeme.

Here are some pictures shared by Dan of Google’s first retail store, named Chromezone, which he’s given us permission to reprint:

Internet Explorer Is Big On Bing

The figures come from a new report by Chitika, which analyzed a week’s worth of traffic across its ad network sites from July 20 to 26, 2011, for North America. Chitika says almost 75% of all Bing search traffic comes from IE users:

Our internal stats here at Search Engine Land confirm what Chitika’s data shows about the strength of Bing usage among IE users.

We went all the way back to the start of the year to see browser usage among both Bing. Our numbers show an even higher percentage of Bing traffic coming from IE users — almost 77%:

For IE, Computer Maker Set Default Choice

While you might think that Bing does well because it’s automatically the default choice in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, that’s not the case. Computer manufacturers themselves generally set the default on new computers.

Google had been very aggressive on this front buying default positioning until around 2008. After that, Microsoft led such deals. The article below explains more:

• Deal Puts Microsoft Live Search On Dell Computers, Verizon Phones — Will It Help?

If you upgrade your computer, I believe that Internet Explorer 9 will use whatever settings you currently have. That’s how Internet Explorer 8 has worked:

• Search & Internet Explorer 8

Benchmarking Internet Explorer

How’s the 75% Internet Explorer usage that Chitika found compare to usage overall? Here’s the breakdown for all traffic use:

As you can see, Internet Explorer has a 52% overall usage. That means the 75% usage by Bing visitors is well above normal. Those deals Microsoft has been cutting are paying off.

Google: Home To The “Alternative” Browsers

That leads to Google? What’s the situation there?

Overall, Internet Explorer is only used by about 40% of visitors to Google Search. After that, Firefox just barely leads Chrome as the most popular browser, 20.3% to 20.1%. Safari is just behind at 19%.

On Search Engine Land, we see a different view. Firefox is actually the leading browser used by people who find us through Google Searcho at 34%, followed by Internet Explorer at 30%, Chrome at 26% and Safari at 10%:

Google has deals with both Firefox and Apple to be the default choice in those browsers. Those deals and arrangements are clearly working well to give Google independence from any lockout the company has long-feared might happen (but never has) in Internet Explorer.

Here’s some more background on all of this:

• Firefox: Google’s Secret Weapon Against Microsoft?
• Google & Mozilla Extend Default Firefox Search Provider Deal<
• Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine!
• Firefox 4 To Add Bing As Search Option
• Google & Apple Extend Search Deal, Emerge As “Frenemies” Not “Froes”
• Apple Renews Maps Deal With Google — What’s Up With That?

In Chrome, Google is the default choice, but only on a new computer that hasn’t already got a browser with a default search engine. If you install Chrome on an existing computer, it will honor whatever your current default is, though it asks for this to be reconfirmed. This is a past article about this, and I believe the situation hasn’t changed:

• Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox

Matt McGee contributed to this report.

This helps give users hands-on access to Google’s PC alternative (an iPad with a keyboard) and it helps Virgin further brand itself as the coolest of domestic carriers (with WiFi on every flight). I suspect this will prompt a few flyers to switch from a dreary airline like United (I’m a United frequent flyer) to a more fun and progressive airline like Virgin (with plugs under every seat).

Virgin has been more experimental and social in its marketing vs. other carriers. It was also the source of the inaugural offer launching the new Loopt “u-Deals” program.

An Unintentional iPad Competitor?

Enter Google’s Chromebook: is this Google’s true competitor to the iPad?

Chromebook is certainly not positioned as a tablet competitor or alternative. But it may turn out that way for some people in the market for a second (or third) computer. There are a fair number of people who probably would prefer a machine that’s more PC-like than the iPad and still “ultra-portable.”

Beyond the MacBook Air, Chromebook is also the most iPad-like of PCs. It doesn’t offer on-device storage or software, there’s no desktop and it relies heavily on a growing library of apps.

Like a Tablet with a Keyboard

Chromebook is not unlike a tablet with a build-in keyboard. And it’s priced (some would say too high) in the same range as an iPad. The cheapest available Chromebook, from Acer, is $349 — a full $150 less expensive than the entry level iPad. At the high end, there’s a Samsung 3G version that retails for $499, the price of the WiFi iPad.

Some people have complained “why buy a Chromebook, when you can get a full-fledged PC for the same price?” In fact, on Amazon the top-selling Windows 7 laptop (the Toshiba Satellite) is $479. As Google previously argued Chromebook is unlikely to be a primary machine (except perhaps for students). It’s more likely going to be a supplemental machine for consumers.

I believe that Chromebook has a great opportunity in the enterprise as the realization of Oracle’s Larry Ellison’s “network PC” concept. But that’s a different discussion.

Mixed Reviews from Some

Early reviews of Chromebook have been mixed. Consumer tech influencers like USAToday’s Ed Baig and the New York Times’ David Pogue have praised it but also said mainstream users probably aren’t ready for the “internetbook.”

Pogue liked many features of Chromebook, but his conclusion was less positive:

It’s really weird to use a computer where everything happens in your browser; if you attach a hard drive or flash drive, you even see its contents in a browser window. You can never quit or minimize the browser; there’s no desktop behind it, no matter what your instincts say.

But let’s give this shifted paradigm a chance. How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world? Unfortunately, not very well.

Baig similarly concluded that the masses weren’t ready for Chromebooks:

Chromebooks raise an important question: Are folks ready for a cloud computer largely crippled when there’s a shaky online connection or none at all? My suspicion is that will be a tough sell, especially for non-techies.

Solid Machine — with the Right Expectations

I received a Chromebook from Google as part of its I/O developer conference giveaway (the Samsung 3G model) and have been using it regularly for the past week or so. I like the machine quite a bit, in part because my expectations are properly calibrated to what the device can and cannot do well.

As with an iPad it would be challenging to write this post on a Chromebook (because of the screenshots primarily). But Chromebook is great for most things you do online, though it can’t run Netflix right now. And if you don’t expect it to totally replace your primary laptop your satisfaction levels will be quite high. The “instant on” capability is great.

Not Another “Netbook”

Chromebook isn’t just another netbook — a category that is largely in decline — because it’s simpler, with no software to install or upgrade and no delay in boot-up time. And surprise of surprises, right now Chromebook is the third best-selling laptop on Amazon. The inexpensive Toshiba Windows 7 machine is first, 13-inch MacBook Pro is second and Chromebook is third.

I had previously wondered whether Chromebooks had missed their window of opportunity with the arrival and success of the iPad. But it turns out the opposite is true: the iPad has laid the groundwork and set consumer expectations for Chromebook.