Good Grief!

So the BBC has bought up all the “Hutton Inquiry” Google links. This is according to The Guardian’s website:

Despite being one of the main players in the drama, anyone searching for “Hutton inquiry” or “Hutton report” on the UK’s most popular search engine Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online’s own news coverage of the inquiry.

Hold on–no one is being automatically directed anywhere. Google displays sponsored links away from the search results, over on the right-hand side of the page. However, even though the BBC’s action isn’t as nefarious as the Guardian makes it sound, it does raise some questions. Because the BBC is a major part of the Hutton inquiry, a skeptic would wonder about its motive for using this particular story to start “experimenting for the first time with paid-for search advertising,” no matter how logical it sounds:

The two-week trial will come out of the BBC’s £63.5m annual marketing budget and a BBC spokesman said that, if successful, the trial would be extended. He added that the corporation was bidding on a number of search terms relating to its news and sports coverage in an effort to drive users to in depth content that they might otherwise miss.

To be fair, the BBC has been making efforts to come clean about its mistakes when reporting that Tony Blair’s staff had “sexed-up” intelligence about Iraq. Even so, if I was a British taxpayer, I don’t think I’d be thrilled about funding Google ads on the matter.

BTW, I couldn’t find any of the BBC’s sponsored links. Perhaps they’ll go up later? On google.com, a search on “hutton inquiry” brings up only one ad–for a bizarre site about sheds and shedness and voting for the best sheds. The same search at google.co.uk doesn’t bring up any sponsored links.