(4)
During the Olympics Google worked with NBC to provide NBC Scores Graphical Ads/Promos. They may be perceived as ads, but they do not look like they are ads based on the click through URL. The big deal back then was that if you did a search on olympics you received the "one box" result. But try a search on loan today and you may get;
This may not be the most relevant result to those searching on the term loan. So I thought I would click over, which has the click through URL;
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=wolympics4&q=http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/5085169/detail.html%3Fqs%3D%3Bt%3D14%3Btab%3DResults
So this does not look like a loan ad by the URL or the result. So I figured I would test this out on some more popular olympic names. Such as Shaun White or Apolo Anton Ohno neither brought up the NBC olympics box, in the last name query or full name query.
Something has to be wrong here; (1) Why would Google show an olympics result for a term like "loan"? (2) Why wouldn't they show an olympics box for a full name of a popular olympics athlete?
I started a thread on this discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Comments:
Radha Khalsa
03/12/2006 04:47 pm
Why does 'Failure" bring up the White House biography of George Bush, at Google?
Barry Schwartz
03/12/2006 04:54 pm
That is totally different.
Michael Nguyen
03/13/2006 05:55 pm
Barry, I'm seeing the box come up for terms like "Shaun" and "Anton". They also come up for the full name search now - looks like someone at NBC added those terms to their campaign recently.
Barry Schwartz
03/13/2006 07:01 pm
Michael, these do not appear to be paid results, see Danny's post, which I linked to above on that. It is weird, the first names do not show the result for me.