How Fair is The Game When Competing with Google

Have you ever thought what would happen if Google had suddenly decided to buy your competitor and start advertising it’s newly purchased toy service through Google Adwords? That’s exactly what happened to this guy and it doesn’t look pretty.

The problem started when Google acquired Jotspot, a business team collaboration tool which goes in direct competition with CentralDesktop, this guy’s platform. Once in this niche, Google started controlling all the top spots for all keywords associated with this service (and even some who aren’t).

Now, this begs the questions, is this competition a fair competition? How much does Google really pay? When Google pays Google does it really matter how much it really pays?

This post started quite the controversy and required Google to respond almost immediately. In their statement, Google claims that

there are no special buttons to push or levers to pull that give our internal account managers special treatment or leverage. Quality Score is automatically evaluated in the same way for our keywords as it is for any advertiser’s keywords. Likewise, the potential to show up in the top spots above the search results is the same for Google’s ads as it is for any other.

and that

we do not intentionally try to secure a top position. In fact, we generally aim for a more ‘conservative’ position.

But, does it really? While ROI for Google may be higher than of it’s competitors and may excuse a larger budget, and while it adheres to all algorithms without any “special buttons”, it also knows the exact content of those algorithms which is unknown to anyone else. Is that fair?

Update: StartupSquad had put together some figured to Google’s spending budget based on the original post. You may be surprised as to the results.