Google Commercializes Homepage
A recent blog post by ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin indicates that at some point yesterday, Google had a large box on the Google.com homepage promoting the Google Toolbar. According to Bogatin’s screenshot, there was for a time a large box in the upper right hand corner of the Google.com homepage which contained an image of part of the Google Toolbar along with the text
‘Put a Google search box in your browser’.
An arrow pointed from the advertisement box towards the top of the browser viewport.
Why would Google do this? I guess they want to spread the Google Toolbar; the more people who install it, the more market and mind share they own. But this goes against their long-standing tradition of a nice, clean, almost spartan front page.
This screenshot is borrowed from Donna Bogatin. I was unable to confirm this siting with any other sources. Has anyone else out there seen this?
I know this is a bit late, but I can confirm that this ad has been showing up on Google.ca for the past few days. It shows up in IE6, but not Firefox. It doesn’t appear on Google.com. I also randomly tried a few other localized versions, the ad appears on some (e.g. Google.de) but not on others (e.g. Google.fr). Here’s a screenshot:
http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/9132/googlead2ua0.jpg
The thing that bothers me most about it, aside from the fact that it mars the clean look of the page, is that when I think of Google I think of “smart” ads. The big ad for the Google Toolbar with an arrow pointing to my Google Toolbar isn’t smart.