I agree that tampering with natural search results would more of an egregious error and maybe it is that since they haven't done this yet, I'm not as put off by the use of the Google tips in promoting some of their own products. I was just making the point that they have not abused their position as both the developer and advertiser in that manner where they likely already could have and that they are still not using these tips for many of their other services.
Fair enough, I'll try to explain my point. In your blog post you listed three example search terms where this "Google Tip" behavior is shown. Those being "calendar", "blog" and "photo sharing". Taking "calendar" as an example, there are competing services offered from both Google and Yahoo which will allow me to have a free online web calendar which appear in the search results following the "Google Tip" (and I am using the word service instead of product here because web applications are as much of services to the user as they are products in the traditional sense and in my opinion the term service fits better). After that tip I am then given links to both www.google.com/calendar and calendar.yahoo.com and presumably I would pick one if I was looking for this type of service and if I had already passed up the link in the "Google Tip".
For this type of behavior to be ubiquitous, Google would have to be using this technique to their advantage in all other areas where they are competing for market share. The service that I alluded to in the original post where there already exists obvious competition is with the finance services offered by both Google and Yahoo. While Google could as easily put up a "Looking for finance information or market data? Try Google Finance" tip just as easily as they do with the "calendar" and "blog" search terms they don't (yet) and in fact they don't even reorder THEIR OWN SEARCH RESULTS to list the Google service ahead of the Yahoo service. So the behavior of promoting their own products first isn't always true and even in places where it would be an obvious advantage (and where they could do it without anyone even raising an eyebrow like with their own search result listings) they are not yet.
Except that finance.google.com is as much of a "Google Product" as Picassa or Blogger and while its not presented in a Google tip format it still appears as the first result. Sorry if you fail to grasp the analogy.
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I agree that tampering with natural search results would more of an egregious error and maybe it is that since they haven't done this yet, I'm not as put off by the use of the Google tips in promoting some of their own products. I was just making the point that they have not abused their position as both the developer and advertiser in that manner where they likely already could have and that they are still not using these tips for many of their other services.
Fair enough, I'll try to explain my point. In your blog post you listed three example search terms where this "Google Tip" behavior is shown. Those being "calendar", "blog" and "photo sharing". Taking "calendar" as an example, there are competing services offered from both Google and Yahoo which will allow me to have a free online web calendar which appear in the search results following the "Google Tip" (and I am using the word service instead of product here because web applications are as much of services to the user as they are products in the traditional sense and in my opinion the term service fits better). After that tip I am then given links to both www.google.com/calendar and calendar.yahoo.com and presumably I would pick one if I was looking for this type of service and if I had already passed up the link in the "Google Tip".
For this type of behavior to be ubiquitous, Google would have to be using this technique to their advantage in all other areas where they are competing for market share. The service that I alluded to in the original post where there already exists obvious competition is with the finance services offered by both Google and Yahoo. While Google could as easily put up a "Looking for finance information or market data? Try Google Finance" tip just as easily as they do with the "calendar" and "blog" search terms they don't (yet) and in fact they don't even reorder THEIR OWN SEARCH RESULTS to list the Google service ahead of the Yahoo service. So the behavior of promoting their own products first isn't always true and even in places where it would be an obvious advantage (and where they could do it without anyone even raising an eyebrow like with their own search result listings) they are not yet.
Except that finance.google.com is as much of a "Google Product" as Picassa or Blogger and while its not presented in a Google tip format it still appears as the first result. Sorry if you fail to grasp the analogy.
For example, type in the word "finance" as your search query and you will see that finance.yahoo.com is returned BEFORE finance.google.com