Is that a big deal? Depends on whom you ask.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who sussed this out yesterday, has two big problems with the notion.

The first is that in at least one case a blogger’s post linked to Google in seeming violation of Google’s policy against so-called “paid links.” Sullivan’s bigger beef is that the content of the posts themselves consists of a video ad and some barely sensical text — the kind of thing that Google is trying to flush out of its search results by tweaking its algorithms.

So what’s going on? I’ve asked Google reps for comment, but I’m still waiting for them to get back from vacation. [UPDATE - they have, see below] But Unruly Media, the London-based company which ran the campaign for Google, was happy to answer. (Yup – Google, which dominates both Web advertising and Web video, relies on an outsider to promote its Web video ads.)

There’s nothing wrong here, says Unruly CEO Scott Button, except for what appears to be a one-off technical mistake by a single blogger. Here’s his email response:

Yes, it’s a campaign we were running at the end of December.

There’s a good response by Andrew Girdwood here.

Andrew’s absolutely right — we don’t ask bloggers to link to the advertiser’s site. It’s just not part of our business model. We help advertisers distribute video content and that’s what we get paid for. All links from the video player itself are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings. Even though we don’t ask bloggers to link, we do advise them to use nofollow if they do link to the advertiser’s site. This is really important and they should do it to protect themselves as much as the advertiser.

As far as I’m aware, there was one link in one post that was not marked nofollow. This was corrected as soon as we became aware of it.

We’re always completely upfront and transparent with bloggers that we are running commercial campaigns and who we’re working for. We always require that bloggers disclose any commercial incentive to post video content. We always require that bloggers disclose even on related tweets that they might do off their own bats.

It’s also a key part of how we operate that we don’t tell bloggers what or how to write. It’s really important that opinions expressed and the tone of voice belong to the author not the advertiser. Occasionally that leads to human error, as here, so we’re always really happy to have these kinds of example flagged and will sort them out as quickly as we possibly can.

Note that Button doesn’t address Sullivan’s complaint that the text in the bloggers’ post is barely better than garbage. That stuff may not be elegant, but it does seem to work — Unruly says its ad network reaches 725 million people a month.

UPDATE: Google has offered a response, and it doesn’t sync with Button’s. Here’s a quote from a Google spokesperson:

“Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

And here’s more along those lines, via Essence Digital, another Google ad vendor, this time posted on a Google+ page:

“We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.”

All of this back-and-forth finger pointing might seem odd to the outside world, but it’s not uncommon in online ads, where money and marching orders pass through multiple points on their way from the original customer to the site that runs the ad.

Here’s the video ad, by the way. I guess I should disclose that Google is not paying me to post this:

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz notes that the doodle is already showing up on other Google properties, though the accompanying message seems to vary depending on the territory. Google Australia, for instance, goes with “Happy Holidays,” but Google Korea wishes visitors a “Merry Christmas.” If you were desperate for news on a pre-Christmas Eve Friday morning, you might try to make a controversy out of that. But that would be silly.

But it’s a very, very small chance. Not much more than three percent, per this chart from Macquarie Group, using data from Efficient Frontier:

And this chart understates Google’s dominance in mobile search ads, because it only tracks advertisers who are spending on both Google and the Yahoo/Microsoft JV. Yahoo/Bing’s true market share, according to Efficient Frontier, is closer to one percent.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land does some back-of-the-envelope math and concludes that will give Google about $1.1 billion in mobile search revenue by the end of the year. Which syncs up directionally, at least with Google’s boast that it was on a $1 billion run rate for all mobile ad revenue last fall.

Pretty cool! Also, kinda scary!

At least it is in this video Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan shot yesterday outside the TED conference, where the search giant was demoing the project for attendees. It was also implicitly trying to explain, again, why it is exactly that an Internet company is building self-driving cars. But whatever. Check out this video!

And now ask yourself: If push came to shove, and I needed to chase down a drug thug who’d hopped onto the NYC subway, who would I want driving my car–Google? Or Popeye Doyle?

Duh.

Perusing AOL’s leaked damn-the-journalism-full-speed-ahead business plan, BoomTown was a little late to the Microsoft Bing event this morning called “Farsight: Beyond the Search Box.”

But things had certainly been cooking with gas when I walked into the meeting room at the University of San Francisco, which the organizers had decked out in white nubby rugs, white pleather couches and those white egg-shaped chairs found only in 1970s decor.

Schweeet!

First up was well-known investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, poo-poohing Microsoft’s prospects of ever making money in search.

“It’s difficult to produce a new search company,” said Thiel, noting that even with a growing market share it’s curtains for Bing, given the huge fixed costs. “As far as I can tell, it’s still not breaking even.”

Ouch!

By the way, Thiel sold semantic search engine Powerset to Microsoft for upward of $100 million in 2008 to help it, you know, get ahead in search.

Way to insult your money-bearing hosts!

Then, moderator Vivek Wadhwa harangued the panelists from Google, Microsoft and Blekko in the session “Who Will Win the Spam Wars?”

And they say I’m a snarky moderator! Wadhwa is snarktastic!

Wadhwa did not like any of it–not crappy content sites that sully Web search, not the efforts the companies were making to fix things, not the vision the trio had of the future.

And, by the way, Microsoft was not ever going to make money off all the company’s efforts.

Way to insult your hosts! I like this event!

Of course, what everyone was interested in was a smackdown between Google and Microsoft, given that the search giant accused the software giant of stealing its results today.

In an excellent, if exhaustive, post by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google said Bing was cheating by lifting its search results, which Google said it had proved via a “honeypot” sting operation.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” Google’s Amit Singhal told Search Engine Land. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The very presence of the word “honeypot” in any story about search algorithms is superb, in my book, even though this “controversy” is pretty much a he-said-he-said geek-off.

Google’s Matt Cutts kept up the cheater pressure at the Bing event, in a short debate with Microsoft’s Harry Shum, who was not having any of it.

“It’s not like we actually copy anything,” he said.

Translation: Actually, we do borrow, just like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevii, resulting in a social networking behemoth that will soon take over all search and make this whole debate moot.

Microsoft is rubber, Google is glue. And Facebook, which was not present at the search event, is the real sticky honeypot.

This screenshot comes from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land, who got Google to acknowledge that yes, it is indeed playing around with conventional-looking Web ads in its mail service, which typically only offers text ads: “We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content.”

Sterling’s post sent many of us Web/ad nerds scurrying to our Gmail accounts to see if we could find evidence of Google’s experiment, but I have yet to see any others. If you find one, please pass it along to me at (peter@allthingsd.com) and I’ll share it with everyone else.

Here’s another example, courtesy of Shyam Somanadh. His pithy description: “First image ad in my Gmail right panel. I had a sudden Hotmail moment there.”

And a broken ad, from Nicholas Wilhelm’s phone:

And one from Hunter Hebert:

And Jeremy Day:

And Rob McAninch:

Here’s a sample, from Google’s blog post announcing the change (via SearchEngineLand). Click on the image to enlarge:

Google has already been flagging sites it thinks are distributing malware, so this is just an incremental step. And Google apparently thinks a “compromised” site is less dangerous than one it thinks “may harm your computer”: If you click on the link for the latter, Google will send you to an “are you really sure you want to go there?” message, but Google won’t actually slow you down if you want to head to a hacked site.

[Image credit: Picture Perfect Pose]

Like a print newspaper.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan was flipping through the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times yesterday and stumbled into this Chrome ad (click image to enlarge). It’s a reference to Google’s head-scratching “Things I Learned About Browsers” e-book.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to point out how ridiculous it is for a Web company to advertise anything at all in offline media. And how especially ridiculous it is for someone to advertise a browser in a newspaper.

But then again: It worked!

(Almost as surprising: Search guru Danny Sullivan routinely reads the print version of the LA Times!)

Or, more accurately, it doesn’t want to tell you about it: The search engine gets heavy use from people looking for “adult” topics (duh), but, for fairly obvious reasons, Google doesn’t want to fill your results page with naughty stuff if you’re not seeking it out.

But that does mean that in some cases people with more-innocent search queries won’t get Instant results.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spends some time walking through Google Instant’s (intentionally) blind spots–if you’re looking for the excellent “Naked Gun” movies, you’ll be out of luck, he notes. Same goes for Picasso’s “Blue Nude,” etc.

And of course, since Google (GOOG) is not actually infallible, Sullivan points out some instances where its censor misses some targets. For instance, “Demi Moore Bush” is not about the actress’s political views. Sullivan ultimately takes the logical step and types in all of George Carlin’s seven words to see how many produce results. Well worth looking at his piece to see how it turns out.

Meantime, here’s Carlin’s famous bit, and you can figure out on your own if it’s safe for work.

Here’s the latest evidence, via Search Engine Land: An “Internet stats” page, distributed via the search giant’s U.K. arm.

What’s the point? Google (GOOG) says it will help those looking for “killer stats for a presentation or maybe just looking to keep abreast of key trends in the digital space.”

But it’s easy to tell what Google is really up to: This is perfect fodder for content farmers, or “content object makers,” casting about for data points to fill up slideshows. And if those slideshows are stuffed with AdSense units, everyone makes (some) money. A virtuous cycle!

True, many of the stats are U.K.-specific, and it’s hard to establish the truthiness level for any given data point. But whatever. People love stats. And many of them are sort of useful, in a hard-to-define way. For instance: Did you know the average Android user who watches YouTube sees 10 clips a day?

“Q: So if this is not the GPhone, when will we see the GPhone, and what will it be?

Eric Schmidt: We’re not announcing anything, but this is the platform for building a GPhone. It starts a whole wave of innovation…

Q: Does that mean there will be NO Google phone you can buy?

ES: Imagine not just one GPhone, but a thousand GPhones as a result of the partnerships…the many other people who will be joining the open initiative. We forgot to tell you that it’s available next week, and the terms are the broadest in the industry.

Q: …GPhone?

ES: We are not announcing a Google phone.

Q: Eric, I want to go back to the GPhone–what’s the deal?

ES: The deal is we don’t pre-announce products….If there were to be a Gphone, it would run Android.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a Nov. 2007 conference call on Android

During an Android demo in April 2008, Steve Horowitz, one of the original engineers working on Google’s Android platform, said “I’m here to tell you there is actually no GPhone,” echoing a similar point made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt when the operating system was announced. Now, not two years later, Google is telling us something different: There is a GPhone and its name is Nexus One.

At an event at Google’s (GOOG) Mountain View, Calif., headquarters this morning, a handful of company execs discussed the genesis of the Nexus One, tracing its evolution from the G1–the first Android phone–to the Verizon (VZ) Droid. In the short time since Android was launched, the number of devices running it has grown to 20, offered by 59 carriers in 48 countries.

“To help Android to adapt to the needs of users like you and me, our engineering department sometimes works with partners to speed innovation around Android,” Mario Queiroz, VP of Product Management, said during opening remarks. “But we want to do more. So we asked ourselves, ‘What if we worked even more closely with our partners to bring devices to market that will help us better showcase some of the technology we’ve developed?’”

The result: Nexus One. “The dictionary definition of Nexus One is a point of convergence. Its that point at which Web meets phone,” Queiroz explains. “The Nexus One belongs in an emerging category of devices we call superphones.”

Eric Tseng, a senior Google product manager, takes the stage to walk through Nexus One’s features, which we’re now all pretty familiar with: 3.7-inch active-matrix organic LED display, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, five-megapixel camera with LED flash, a trackball with a multicolor notification LED, light and proximity sensors that save power.

The device is 11.5 millimeters thick and weighs about 130 grams, which Tseng notes is no heavier than a keychain-size Swiss Army knife. Nexus One runs on Android 2.1, a.k.a. “Eclair.” Oh, it also offers “support” for personalization–engrave your name or that of a loved one on the back.

That’s the baseline offering, but there are other enhancements. Among them: Five home-screen panels that allow users to add more widgets, like Google’s GPS weather widget, which is evidently very exciting and “Googley.”

Another enhancement: “Living wallpapers,” dynamic, animated home-screen images–leaves falling on water, for example; tap the screen and the water ripples. Neat feature, but not exactly a killer app.

Also onboard: A photo-gallery app developed with the folks at Cool Iris and tricked out with some pretty slick 3-D viewing. Tip the phone and the photos recede, etc.

Finally, Google has developed some significant voice enhancements. Evidently, the company has voice-enabled all text fields on the device. “Now, we can speak our tweets and Facebook status updates,” says Tseng.

All in all, an impressive device. Be sure to read Walt Mossberg’s review for a more in-depth look at Nexus One.

So how do you get your hands on a Google superphone? Through a “Google-hosted Web Store,” says Queiroz. You can buy a phone with service from a carrier partner, or without service.

A Nexus One without service goes for $529. For $179, you can buy it from T-Mobile with service. In the spring, you’ll be able to buy it from–surprise!–Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD).

Transactions will be handled by Google Checkout, so if you’re a Google Account holder, purchasing the device should be fairly simple.

One last point worth noting here: Queiroz stresses that the Nexus One is the first of a number of products developed via this new collaborative process with partners. “Our plan is to add more carriers and more devices in the future,” he says.

Ah. As Eric Schmidt said back in 2007, “Imagine not just one GPhone, but a thousand GPhones as a result of the partnerships.”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE Q&A:

• Nexus Ones ordered from T-Mobile ship today.
• Google is the merchant of record. When you buy a Nexus One, you buy it from Google.
• Why was it necessary for Google to design the Nexus One? Google didn’t really design the phone. “HTC did, Google is just merchandising it.”
• Android 2.1 will be available for Droid and other Android devices soon.
• Google’s Web Store is “simply another distribution channel.” It is not designed to replace or disintermediate carriers or mobile phone retailers.
• Queiroz on the Google Web Store program: “If users are interested in a different form factor and our software supports it, we’ll pursue it. We’re going to look at different options of devices that can be added to the program. We will consider other mobile phones.”
• Andy Rubin, VP, Engineering: “Today’s superphone is tomorrow’s smartphone.”
• Question from Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land: “Where is the ad-supported mobile phone? Where’s the revolution?” Sadly, Rubin dodges. Gotta take a first step before you can change the world…blah lah blah.
• How do superphones differ from smartphones? Rubin: “It’s just the evolution of the platform….It’s the greater memory, the faster processors….The Nexus One is as powerful as your laptop was four years ago.”
• Question for Motorola’s (MOT) Sanjay Jha: Is Motorola worried that Nexus One will cannibalize Droid sales? Jha says no, and his presence here today supports that. Still it’s tough to believe him. Maybe Motorola and Google are already working on Nexus Two.

From Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land:

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”

Note that this offer doesn’t appear to be specific to phones running Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system. And it appears to be running in addition to Google’s practice of providing phone numbers in organic search results, which also essentially provide “click to call” options for smartphone users.

In Sterling’s words: “This is a version, effectively, of “pay-per-phone call” but the cost per call is the same as a click–a bargain (generally speaking) for the advertisers to receive a ‘warm lead.’”

Google first started playing around with “click to call” programs for conventional Web search four years ago. In that scenario, you gave Google your phone number (this was designed for landline use, really), and it connected calls to advertisers on your behalf.

Google eventually moved on, since no one seemed to use this option (though you can still see traces of the program here). But connecting mobile users with advertisers ought to be a very lucrative proposition, so no surprise that Google is still chasing after this.

That’s now resolved, via Google’s “Professional Search” page, which is just a tiny bit more complicated than a conventional search. You jot down how much you plan to spend on online ads and what kind of help you’re looking for, and it spits out a list of “Google Advertising Professionals”: Search pros who have earned Google’s equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

This makes plenty of sense, right? It might make even more sense if Google (GOOG) publicized the directory (which is in beta, of course). But so far, the company seems to be keeping quiet about it. I learned about the service via Search Engine Land, which got tipped by Google pro Tim Cohn.

[Seal of Awesomeness via genetic lorax]

Google is being unfairly blamed for the declining newspaper-industry revenue resulting from shifting reader habits, Schmidt told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan in an interview posted over the weekend.

“Because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything,” Schmidt said. “Imagine if Google didn’t exist. Would the same criticism still exist? You betcha.”

Read the rest of this post on the original

Among the enhancements to Yahoo’s search page design–the features that, in the company’s words, “exemplify how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience”–are the following:

• a unified, Bing-like design
• an enhanced search assistant
• the ability to play video within search results
• a set of filters that allow users to refine their searches based on prior queries or follow-on searches of other sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (click on image below to enlarge).

“The Web is huge, billions of pages, millions and millions of sites and domains,” explained Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s VP of search products and design. “You do not care about all of it. We are bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search.”

Which is all well and good. But isn’t that exactly what Google and Microsoft claim to be doing as well? Doesn’t everyone have a search assistant these days? Doesn’t Microsoft’s Bing already offer in-line video viewing in its search results? (Google once did as well, but disabled the feature over performance issues.) And aren’t Yahoo’s filters basically another version of Google’s “Show More Results” feature? They certainly appear to be.

So these things aren’t true innovations; rather, they’re innovations of the new-to-Yahoo sort. They’re table stakes at a search game that Yahoo has already lost. So “bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search” doesn’t really mean much when they’re already front and center in market-leading offerings, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land.

“There are certainly some aspects that are becoming commoditized in the foundation in search,” Cornett said. “You can either overwhelm people and give them millions and millions of results or show them what they care about the most. That is exactly where we’re going to continue, building a search experience that understands what they’re looking for.”

That sounds great–except it’s not anything different from what Microsoft says. And if Google doesn’t say it, that’s because searchers are voting with their actual search activity that Google’s already doing it. In addition, while Cornett suggested that Yahoo is somehow spending huge amounts of time and money coming up with a better personalized experience over competitors, the fact remains that Google has long offered personalized results that outdistance Yahoo.

Cuil, sophomorically pronounced “cool,” isn’t exactly the sort of name from which global brands are made (Google arguably wasn’t either but at least people knew how to pronounce it). And if its search engine boasts greater comprehension and relevance than Google’s (GOOG) as Cuil claims, why doesn’t it display the company itself in a search for “Cuil” instead of “Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha,” “French Cuisine,” and “Lochaber”? (My first search for “cuil” returned nothing at all.) This, from a search outfit with a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s and an executive team of Google veterans?

“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”

And you have to be useful. Effective, too. Right now, Cuil seems to be lacking in both areas. “This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft (MSFT), much less Google, that’s another story.”

To be fair, Cuil does have one thing going for it: a privacy policy that seems to be quite a bit more favorable to users than Google’s.

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”