Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google’s ready to get behind the service in a big way. The
screenshot above shows a new promotional “tip” I just got in my web search
results. I’ve never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can
recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads:
Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try
Blogger
It seems to be triggered by any use of the word “blog” in a search. For me, all of these
will make it come up:
By making this a tip rather than promoting Blogger in ad units,
Google avoids the entire debate of whether it pays for its ads fairly or not (it
recently said it does; last year after similar reassurances, I
still found
I had a ton of questions I may yet follow up on for answers).
Personally, I’ve got no problem with the tip. As I’ve
written,
I want Google to do promos like this outside of the ad units, so advertisers aren’t
to lose a spot to Google itself.
Don’t forget, Blogger does sounds like it has some pretty handy new features.
Find the rundown on the official Blogger blog
here.
Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes Google Calendar has been promoted this way before.