Valleywag
How Google promotes itself in search results
It was bound to happen, I suppose. As Google hosts more content, such as videos, the search engine is starting to discriminate against other web publishers. An example, highlighted by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped: in 2004, he explained on his blog how to count with one's fingers, in binary. That post still tops out Google's search results for "finger flip flop". But Google's own video of the exercise now displays with a thumbnail, and a link allowing the clip to be viewed within the search results. As does the another clip hosted on Google's Youtube service. (For the screenshot, see after the jump.) Google will no doubt explain that it's so tightly integrating its own offerings in the interest of users' convenience; and that it plans to provide similar promotion of external search results. The truth is that, as Google's tentacles stretch further into the web, it will have plenty of reasons, business and technical, to keep users in its own network.
12:52 PM on Wed May 23 2007
By Nick Denton
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