diberry - 6:59 pm on Jun 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Honestly, I can't say that I blame them for wanting to make some money off of this.

They were already making more money than God. The whole thing with going public is that it becomes all about profits at that point. You're not dealing with investors who maybe love what you do and want to make money, but also want to preserve your corporate integrity. Stockholders just want the price to go up and up forever. They're not savvy, aware or interested about the fact that sometimes what you have to do to keep boosting those stock prices can destroy your brand over time.

Not that this is going to destroy Google's brand. But I do wonder what the user experience will be like, though. Google's saying it'll be a combination of bidding for placement and other metrics, which sounds to me like if they think your website is skeevy looking, you'll have to pay more for the top position than someone else would... but what if a skeevy website is willing to do that? Won't that turn shoppers off to Products as a whole? Or is Google going to not let them near the top no matter what they paid, in which case that would be massively anti-competitive if anyone can prove it?

We should throw together some skeevy sites, take up a collection, and bid those things to the top. :D