Google promoting itself through ... itself?

A huge discussion is taking place on the web around Google using AdWords to promote their own services. How does this work and why?

A fairly big discussion has been started off by a guy called Isaac who claimed that Google manipulates the AdWords algorithm in order to get themselves onto the top rank of the sponsored ads for certain keywords.

Matt Cutts also picked up on this post and provided his own reply.

Now, I am in a strange position with this one. I like Matt Cutts and think he is a great guy to learn about SEO from, since he worked on Google PageRank algorithm himself.

However, at the same time I find myself a little confused on people's lack of at least semi-scientific approach to testing the matter.

So what I did was to type in a few keywords into Google and find out what the results are saying and try to compare and see whether anything fishy is happening.

Here are my findings (each keyword has a screen shot of what I obtained as proof of my test cases):

Blog: Google is first here in the sponsored links as well as in four out of five top organic links (the first organic result is a link to Wikipedia article on what a blog is). I also tested for similar keyword 'blogs' which returned similar results with the first organic result being Google's Blog Search and the top sponsored link being a link to Blogger.com.

Books: This one returned Amazon as the top main sponsored link, however Google was top on the side bar of sponsored links as well as effectively second in the organic search.

Calendar: Here Google was first in the sponsored links and effectively second in the organic search results.

Desktop: Google can be seen on most of the main results page (paid and unpaid). Sidebar adverts relate to hardware providers, which cannot be in direct competition with a desktop related software.

Map: Google top in the organic search and featuring one sponsored link with their own link to Google Maps there on the side bar. I also ran another search for this one with singular word 'maps', which yielded pretty much the same results slightly reshuffled, with another unrelated sponsored link (i.e. a link to a retailer of printed maps).

Photo editing: Here is an interesting one. I am a bit of a photographer also, hence this one is close to home for me. This search brings out Picasa as the top sponsored link, which is really interesting and also brings out something I personally did not notice before, a Google tip which suggest use of Google Image search. Here, unlike in the other cases, the other sponsored links are actually competitive services.

Photos: This one is also very interesting. Brings up Picasa up top in the sponsored links on the side. Also brings the tip to use Google Image search.

Sketching: Perhaps an unusual search term, but this one also brought up Google as the first option within the sponsored results.

Talk: A slightly more straight forward of cases is this organically obtained No. 1 for Google Talk.

Toolbar: This also brings Google into a dominant position in sponsored search as well as in the top organic result. Microsoft and Yahoo tool bars are also featured here which is the second case of 'proper' competitiveness happening here. On a slightly funnier side another a totally unrelated ad pops up here telling me that 'I am really ugly'. Nice!

Video: One of my favourite search terms these days. Google, again, comes up top with their Video offering in organic search and sponsored link on the side bar. YouTube is only in the third place after Yahoo video.

News: My initial search on this did not get anything Google related here, but second time I searched the top sponsored link came out as Google News actually. Also, let's bare in mind here that Google has done a clever thing of promoting news through special links here which lead directly to related and top news stories as special results in 'organic' Google search results.

Search: Someone interestingly pointed out that MSN search comes up as first result in Google Search, 'proving' that Google is fair here giving Microsoft an advantage. My point here is that by searching for keyword search on Google you are already using Google search, hence the result of your search is not really significant for Google, since you are already 'on Google' and are using their tool. Also, perhaps this argument is better backed up by doing a simple search for 'search' keyword in MSN search. Guess what, you get Google as the top organic result there also.

What does my mini-research prove?

I will leave it to each reader to work out for themselves. The results are very interesting in my view.