BP Buys "Oil Spill" Search Term

technology_dude found an unsurprising but amusing little story that BP is buying keywords on Google and Yahoo for things like "Oil Spill" to help spin some damage control. I guess if you can't plug your spill, the least you can do is try to clog the flow of information.

Comments

Surprisingly Competant for an Evil Villain

[eldavojohn]

But I guess they're doing pretty well so far with their coverage on bp.com and using dispersants to keep most of the spill at depth and keeping away science vessels so they're free to misunderestimate the true magnitude.

Science vessels? According to Newsweek, it's photographers and people looking to document the damage that BP is turning away. Now that's some unadulterated bullshit "damage control."

I heard on NPR that some people looking to investigate beaches were turned away by policeman and when they asked the policemen who was paying them to do that the policeman said they were off duty police officers employed by BP. I don't know if that's true or if the people are lying but the stinks worse than crude if it's the truth and I hope the US AG criminal investigation gets to the bottom of that.

Re:So... I can transfer money from BP to Google?

[RivenAleem]

Now what we need is a press release from Google saying that all revenue generated from the BP add goes towards helping clean the spillage.

Then we can just sit back while BP goes bankrupt (though I suspect there's an upper limit to the cost of the add...)

Re:It may seem egregious and offensive

[LWATCDR]

I hate to even ask but have you gone to the site they linked to their ad? http://www.bp.com/bodycopyarticle.do?categoryId=1&contentId=7052055&nicam=USCSBaselineCrisis&nisrc=Google&nigrp=Non_Branded_Crisis_Management-_General&niadv=General&nipkw=oil_spill
It isn't a terrible site. It is clearly marked as a BP site as well.
No Astroturfing just a site about what they are doing.
Totally expected and frankly people would be screaming if they had not done it.
They also have live feeds from the ROVs which seems pretty cool
This is so not a story but hey what do you expect?