The latest and greatest blogosphere flurry is over the audacity of Google daring to toot their own horn by offering ‘tips’ at the top of searches for terms like ‘calendar’ and ‘blogs’.

It’s interesting to me that no one really questions the right of a business to promote its own products on its own pages. Instead, the argument seems to be around the Google motto to “do no evil”, suggesting that any form of self-promotion can be viewed as either evil or an erosion of trust.

Mike Arrington views the ‘tips’ move as arrogance, and goes on to say:

Google needs to change. They can’t kill the motto, so they need to live up to it, permanently. They need to stop treating the outside world with disdain, and replace it with transparency and honesty. Users must always come first. Always. And they need to do it soon.

Arrington’s mandate is far more arrogant than Google’s tips. They haven’t done anything wrong! The screenshot at the beginning of this post shows a clear differentiation between search results and “tips”. The search results haven’t changed, but there is a little Google ad at the top. B.F.D.

Matthew Ingram is more reasonable, pointing out that:

Google is being held to a much higher standard than another company likely would be, in part because it is so large now, and also because of its famous “Don’t be evil” motto — which is clearly causing way more trouble than it’s worth.

Perhaps it’s worth stopping for a few minutes and defining evil. Evil is not placing a small promo for one’s own products at the top of a search page. If that were true, we’d have to call Arrington evil, since he has ads for Edgio at the top of Techcrunch. Of course he’s not evil, and neither is Google.

Google provides free mail, calendar, spreadsheet, video, word processing, blogging and picture tools. They are entitled to promote those products and anyone searching with their engine should expect it. What tradeoff would be more appropriate for providing free server space, bandwidth and tools?

It’s their right to self-promote. Leave ‘em alone.

Update: Matt Cutts gives a stronger insight into the Google culture and says that if Google had more bloggers perceptions would change. Perhaps, but I think it’s really more of a situation where Google is the big target that’s hard to miss. Taking aim and hitting Google is easy but not necessarily valid — being objective and realistic seems to be a harder task.

Technorati Tags: search, Google tips