Google is buying marketshare for Google Checkout by profiling merchants who use it, and giving them free high PageRank links from Google sites.

The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog. Not only does that post provide direct links, one one of the links is a deep link with targeted anchor text.
The blog post about GolfBalls.com contains the following passage:

In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.

They talk about searching for an item, and instead point that link at a product page on GolfBalls.com. That is like me telling you to search Google for something then dropping an eBay affiliate link in the post.

If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I would do it differently than Google is doing it. I would just like to remind Google engineers that they would call me as a spammer if I did the same things they do to make their business model work.

This is a mistake Google has made many times in the past.

How can Google ask webmasters to police paid links then do that kind of crap? What a bunch of hypocritical garbage.

I recently installed the new business edition of Google's custom search engine. It took about 5 minutes to set up and will likely pay for itself many times over. You can use it by using the search box in the right rail. Google's custom search engine is easy to customize, fast to implement, works across multiple domains and is cheap. It only costs $100 a year for up to 5K pages and $500 a year for 50K pages. It also allows the owner to see search frequency and your most popular queries.

Rather than doing Google site specific searches, now I can see Google flavored results customized to my site right from my own domain. If I am searching for something on my own site and can't find it, the odds are pretty good that I am not going to show up in Google's global search either.

Using Google's search will likely also help you figure out how well they trust different pages on a site or a subset of sites, as it likely factors in link popularity and other off site relevancy measurements (unlike most site search services). If your site is easier to search it is easier for you and others to cite your archived content.

Using search results with the same format as Google's will also show you how compelling your documents look to customers on Google, from a searcher's perspective. Some consumers may also view your business as being more Google friendly if you use a Google site search service. Their awareness of and affinity toward Google's brand may help increase your conversions.

When Brin and Page wrote The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine they noted that advertising biases search engines toward the needs and wants of advertisers, and against the best interest of consumers.

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Not surprising then, when Google becomes a leading advertising engine, they go so far to cater to advertisers that Google's blog bashes documentaries while using that opportunity and platform to remind advertisers they can manipulate public perception by buying Google AdWords ads and Google delivered AdSense ads on content websites.

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.

Cory Doctorow offers an alternative solution

Another approach would be to reform the practices that Moore criticises in the film -- for example, refusing to pay for an insured individual's surgery because she didn't mention a 15-year-old yeast infection on her application; denying MRIs to patients with brain tumors; and paying medical directors bonuses for denying claims.

Google also has a health advertising page, which goes so far as to say

Yes, healthcare consumers are moving online. But there's more to the story than that. For instance, the Internet is the leading media source of health, medical, and prescription-drug information. In addition, the majority of consumers use a search engine prior to requesting a prescription drug from a doctor. The bottom line: The Internet plays a central role in the way consumers' access healthcare information.

This is the sort of stuff I was fearing when I wrote about Google's shift from direct marketing to selling brand ads. There is no care for relevancy if spreading misinformation pays more:

I can see how one might want to play up the fact that Google is admitting it can “use” the web sites in its content network to sway the public perception…which is really telling all those web masters running Google ads that they are Google pawns, that Google is not neutral morally or politically, and that Google seeks out opportunities to exploit that (for profit).

SEOs get a black eye for market manipulation, but is what Google suggests any better? Nope. It is only wrong to manipulate public perception or relevancy if you don't have enough money to pay Google directly. If you have a wallet open it up and let Google syndicate your spin.

Blogging, email, IM, and telephone make it easy to keep in touch with your real friends. Social networks are hyped, but tend to have low value traffic because they don't effectively separate signal from noise. The only people who have time for them are people hawking crap, people looking to waste time, and spam bots.

Sure Google owns Orkut, but they don't need it. Google already is a social network, and became one by targeting and partnering with the power users and influencers, but few people think of them as a social network. If you are a webmaster there is a good chance that Google delivers your ads, controls your feed, is your analytics provider, and is a leading source of traffic to your site. News sites and other trusted editorial partners are rewarded with high Google rankings, and become addicted to Google's traffic the way LookSmart was addicted to Microsoft's traffic a few years ago.

On top of having touch-points with most webmasters, Google also has touch-points with mass information consumers. Google's Toolbar gives them web history, which knows where you have been and how long you were there. Google Reader is the most popular feed reader service on the web. They know what voices you trust and subscribe to, and allow you to share your subscriptions or favorite items with friends.

Google's personalized homepage is also the most functional, customizable, and useful service by any of the major portals. Google gadgets are easy to create and syndicate, and Google allows you to publish gadgets or tabs with anyone.

They go so far as recommending information via the interesting items for you gadget, a recommendations tab on customized homepages, and toolbar recommendations.

Google Maps allows you to link to any location, adds data layers from trusted third parties, and accepts public comments on maps.

YouTube makes it easy to upload and syndicate videos, and now those are highly ranked in Google's search results. Look at YouTube's TestTube to see the community features they are planning.

Google offers an auto-complete feature, which makes it easy to refine your search based on the searches of others. They also show related sites and hot searches, and let you note sites you like via Google Notebook. If you don't find their results entirely relevant they make it easy to create a custom search engine using their data.

Keep track of time and your projects using Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Sure Google has Orkut, but they don't need it. By default Google keeps hold of your attention so they can use it to improve their relevancy algorithms and ad targeting. Tie in search personalization with automated ad optimization and their information sharing tools and it is easy to think of Google as the web's largest social network, though most people don't think of them that way, largely because they put information at the center of it, and are so good at separating signal from noise.

A bit slow to mention this article that came out while I was at SMX, but it is worth mentioning. The NYT ran an article about Google's relevancy algorithms titled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, which talks about how Google reacts to relevancy problems. The article should be required reading for all SEOs and search lovers. Rand offered a great overview of the article, highlighting that Google noticed their age weighting was too heavy when Google Finance was not ranking where they thought it should, Google changes their matching algorithms to place more weight on phrase matching for some queries, and that Google has created a query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm which determines how well to mix in new and old results.

Matt Cutts, who was quoted in the New York Times article, also commented on it on his blog, confirming that

The search-quality team makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.

Google is not the only search engine heavily focused on the human elements of search. In one of Tim Mayer's slides he showed a Yahoo! search result which said something along the lines of Yahoo! employees see bad results? Report spam.

The two things Google does more aggressively than the other engines are:

• Drive traffic: they send Wikipedia 12x as much traffic as Yahoo! does

• Impart intent upon the publisher

Build as many quality signals as you can, such that if they ever impart intent on your sites you can get away with more dirty stuff than a spammy sounding unbranded site can.