Friday, March 6, 2009

NeoDatis, Google & Db4O

Last week I got an email from a Neodatis user, he was concerned and asked me if DB4O had acquired NeoDatis, because he was googling the NeoDatis name(a fast way to reach the NeoDatis site) and suddenly he came across with a DB40 link on the sponsored area. In a first glance I didn't believe it,
so I decided to try it by myself. Guess what appeared in the sponsored link area ? Db4O.

First thought: There is a bug in google adword display algorithm, as the keywords must be the same they displayed Db4O ad instead on NeoDatis.

But looking better at the ad (below) you can see that the title of the ad is NeoDatis but the link is to the Db4O site! For me it was weird, to see as an open source(as they claim to be) project like Db4O
use these kind of stategy to fool the community. Even they consider NeoDatis ODB as a real threat, I just want to develop ODB, and I never though to use an ad strategy like that before.











(Updated: 03/07/2009 : It seems Db4o deactivated the adwords campaign, probably after checking this blog)

This kind of event raises some interesting questions:

- Such commercial strategy is interesting for the open source community?

- Is this legal to do this? Can Db4O ask Google to display an ad with the name of a concurrent open source project linking its own site?

Any thought about this?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi.

What seems to be going on there is that the title of the ad is set to {keyword} meaning that the title changes automatically to the user entered keyword. It's not like they are impersonating.
It's common in the search idustry to bid on related keywords (common subjects, products in the same category, etc). If both products are similar is good for the user to know about both (competition is good) but I don't know if this is the case because I don't know the products.
HTH
Harry

Tety said...

I wonder if there is anybody who can reproduce this behavior...
I'm not getting the results described, moreover the db4o page mentioned on the picture:
http://www.Db4o.com/FasterToMarket
does not even exist
And Db4o with a first capital letter is also very strange as db4o band name starts from the lower case

NeoDatis ODB said...

Hi Tetyana!,

I have tried now (03/07/09), and it seems they deactivated this specific campaign. (they must have seen this blog). But if you check http://www.keywordspy.com/overview/domain.aspx?q=db4o.com/FasterToMarket you will see this url existed.

Thanks,
Olivier

German Viscuso said...

Hi Olivier.

The add was set to put the keyword in the title. Nobody tried to impersonate. When I saw your blog I asked the web marketing company to fix this.