Google Promotes Motorola / Verizon Droid Phone on its Homepage

Google has become so enamored with the new smartphone, Motorola Droid, that it has begun to advertise the phone on its homepage. ‘The Droid is on sale now. Learn more’ is the tag that greets us along with the Google Doodle on the homepage. If you click on the ‘learn more’ link, it directs you to the mobile partners’ page like verizonwireless.com and droiddoes.com and also throws up search results for the smartphone.

The link that is present on the homepage of Google will redirect you to a virtual page which is blocked by the site’s robots.txt file which is in compliance with the paid links policy of Google. But there is a Google search on Droid on the Motorola homepage which has no such block and will take you to the Verizon site.

This is not the first time that Google has run promotions on its homepage; earlier, in 2008, the site promoted the smartphone T-Mobile G1 which was the first Android-based phone. Though Google’s Marissa Mayer had famously declared that the website intends to be ad-free unlike other portals, it has always indulged in promoting many products like these over the years. The two notable products that Google promoted in the past were the Da Vinci code and Firefox in 2006, both of which were non-Google products.

When asked about the new promotion campaign, Google’s Gabriel Stricker made a statement saying that currently the website is promoting Droid. He also said that from time to time, Google homepage directs its users to the current and exciting information like a product, news item or relief measures for tsunami. He also mentioned that the Droid is a hardware product and Google has an active collaboration with it, hence the interest in promoting the product.

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