Is Google being Evil?
Arabcrunch, one of the blogs i read on a regular basis, writes about Google launching an Arabic transliteration service Ta3eeb that competes with Arabic transliteration and search service Yamli.
According to ArabCrunch, Google is using it’s monopoly on search and advertising to promote it’s own service. When a search is done for Yamli, an ad is displayed for ta3eeb (see the screenshot below, Source: ArabCrunch
To my understanding you cannot use keywords that does not match your ad when advertising on Adwords, so here Google is going against its Ad words policy
I do not believe there is anything wrong with bidding for competitors keywords (i.e Obama Buying out keywords for clinton/palin) however you cannot use the name in your AD copy, something Google has not done. So they have not violated any of their policies. Though the other point made in the post is valid, Google has the monopoly on search and advertising and could use this to promote their own service extensively at no cost. It could also be used to spur Yamli themselves into buying keywords for their own name. Since then the ads have been removed and this was also covered by TechCrunch
ArabCrunch likens it to
it is leveraging monopoly, similar to Microsoft using its OS monopoly and installing IE to kill Netscape back in the 90s.
So, is Google being evil?
Tagged as arabic, Google, ta3eeb, yamli + Categorized as Uncategorized