[Sam Barona]

Joe Lewis | Staff Writer

A firestorm of negativity has surrounded Google in recent weeks
concerning the company's practice of advertising its own services
as "tips" in SERP pages queried by users. At least for today, the
company has put that practice on hold.

It seems that when the blogosphere speaks, Google listens (for
the most part).

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was the first to spot the news
this afternoon. After a public outcry and allegations that Google
had embraced the Dark Side of the Force (who would have ever made
that outlandish statement?) the company seems to have responded
to the cries of the people and removed its "tips" from search
result pages.

Is Google getting a raw deal in this? This is the criticism from
Mozilla developer Blake Ross:

"First, two notes. One, Yahoo and Ask already do this, but they
didn't build their businesses on the promise of being
unconventionally trustworthy."

So, does Google get held to a higher standard than other companies?
The PPC Blog puts it this way:

"I think Google does get a bit of a rough deal in comparison to
the other search engines. Why? Simply because there is that much
more expectation for Google to do no evil, so to speak. We expect
it elsewhere, so it's like a complement in many ways to Google."