Google has our best interests in mind

Thanksgiving is coming soon and my job is to think of some new recipes for our traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I wanted to make a bundt cake and not having a recipe book so I had to find one somewhere. So what did I do? I Googled it. Although Google is just a search engine, it has become so efficient at what it does that we have begun to use its very name as a verb. So I type in the name “ bundt cake,” and a list of websites with various bundt cake recipes. There was much more than I could find in a recipe book. I find an Amaretto Bundt cake recipe and I am on my way

Google has created the ultimate search engine. Many people are dependent on it for all information. I probably use Google 10 to 20 times a day just to get information about the world. Anything I need to know the answer is there. Yet you wonder where Google makes their money. The same way most companies do, through advertising. However, many might ask where are the ads? There are no bright pop ups, No dancing people on the side saying they got a free credit report, no flashing banner advertising a free laptop. Instead there is a small column on the right site of the page with advertisements for companies that offer products or services related to your search. Often times those ads can be just as important to your search as the websites that initially come up.

When searching for my bundt cake recipe ads come up for bundt cake pans from HSN, or bundt cake mixes from Target; all things I could use to help me make a cake. Google has even started advertising like this in their email program. When I open an email Google uses key words to link ads to. An email about student government will bring up government ads and student government help sites. Googles ads have turned out to be more helpful than an annoyance.

It is in Google’s list of ten things they know to be true where one can find their philosophy on advertising. Number six of their ten things is a statement that I think evokes the very virtue of Google, “You can make money without doing evil.” With this very statement we can see the goal of Google. They want to produce advertising that is not intrusive. They accomplish it effectively and in the process persuade us to purchase things that are beneficial to our lives at the time. I think that is the way that advertising should be. It should not blast things in our faces that are irrelevant to what we are doing at the time. Advertising should capitalize on what we as consumers are actually looking for and I think that Google has accomplished that aim.