Whenever I’m browsing to a dotcom, I only type the name without the suffix (or affix) and just hit ctrl-enter to go there. Call it lazy or time-saving. I was searching for ‘Google’ and accidentally did something wrong, causing my browser (maxthon) to open op a Yahoo! SERP [link]. (Maxthon, an IE-based browser uses Yahoo! instead of MSN, interestingly enough). GeoLocation makes me end up in the UK & Ireland version.
I noticed the first (sponsored) result for Google was a link to eBay.co.uk and
it looked like this:
I usually don’t click on ads, but I just wanted to find out what Google Products were for sale at eBay, and to be honest I was quite amused by what I’ve seen. Let me tune you in :)
Isn’t that cute? I can buy a GMail account for $0.93 :) Here I was thinkin it was for free. But it gets better. If I pay a little more, I can get this :
Wow ! Almost 200 MB more for only $1.70 ! Sweet ! But of course, this is for an ‘Exclusive Google GMail Account. I totally understand. This is if you want to be with different from ‘the crowd’. This means that 155 MB of Google webspace is worth about $0.77. Good to know.
This is for the real Google lovers, the real stuff ! Not for rookies !
But if you see it big, you can also opt-in on this one :
Needless to say this really is a bargain compared to the other results ! Tricky part is : You get the ten (10) invitations for $1.70. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can get the accounts. Too bad it doesn’t mention if it’s for the regular GMail accounts or the Exclusive ones. ;)
On a side note : I saw ebay changes the word ‘goggles’ into ‘googles’, which brings us to following items :
(Not for climbing mountains or riding bikes !)
Or what about these exclusive Night Vision Googles ?
Now you can search in the dark too !
Google Products are also for kids. I’ll illustrate it with the following image :
Not bad at all, these customized Google products. I wonder if Google knows about this algorithm that transforms their registered, trademarked name into a random product.
Another goody : The Google Wine. Sure the Google Guys have lots of money, which would make it seem logical they have a good wine cellar too. Here’s what I came up with :
This link
is a totally unrelated sale, but it’s announced as a Google Adsense website that’s
been put up for sale. In fact it’s just an unknow site about recipes :
This is just to illustrate how Google is being used. Abused if you want to call it that way. And how eBay tolerates it and even contributes to the abuse by letting their algorithms change existing words into the keywords used by a surfer in a search engine. This sort of coding gives internet a bad name. I’d call it eBay-spam. Imagine these sales pages turning up in SERPs. Then it would be spam in general. This is misleading and deceiving. It’s just not-done.
Here’s the [eBay link]