I think there are several valid points in the article which I quoted and highlighted in my previous comment, and I haven’t seen any compelling counter arguments to them yet.

If you’re referring to the author of the article I linked to (Blake Ross) as a “marketing expert” I’d correct you on that; he’s one of the main developers of Firefox, which I think gives him plenty of “real geek” cred, as well as insight into Google as a company, since they have a strong relationship with them.

I also think it’s in our best interest to bring this up to keep them honest but as I said they really haven’t done anything “evil” just yet. This is just some dumb marketing “expert” convincing the real geeks to change how they manage the ads of their own products.

We went through this same thing when they moved Video to the main search page as an option bumping another.

After all, Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top. Search for “photo sharing� and you should already get the highest quality services. According to Google, Picasa is not one of them. These “tips,� then, can only be a tacit admission of failure: either the company does not believe in its own search technology, or it does not believe its products are good enough to rise to the top organically. I’d guess the latter. And if I were on the Calendar, Blogger or Picasa teams, I wouldn’t be celebrating the news that my employer has lost faith in me.

In addition, I think that while it’s certainly fine for them to include ads for their own services, I don’t know whether it’s really ethical (or in Google’s terms “evil”) to apply different rules to their own ads than they apply to those in their adsense product. To quote the article again:

While advertisers compete to be first in a string of lookalike ads that are often shunted to the side, Google now determines the precise position and appearance of ads tips that are not subject to any of the same rules. Its ads get icons while others don’t, and if you think that’s small potatoes, you are not an advertiser: images boost clickthrough. Google can make a Picasa ad say “Easier to use than Kodak,� but Kodak cannot create an ad that reads “Easier to use than Picasa.� And the kicker: neither the highest quality ads nor the highest quality search results can replace these tips.

The final nail in the coffin for me is that I think everyone is giving Google WAY more benefit of the doubt than it would give any other company (like Microsoft) if they did the exact same thing. As Blake points out, Microsoft could easily detect any time a Windows user tried to load Google search in their browser and instead pop up an alert that says “Looks like you’re trying to search the web. Try MSN Live Search for the best search results”. I’m pretty certain you would not be OK with this, but it’s exactly what Google is doing here.