People Search on Google

Why doesn’t Google allow advertisers to buy “Proper Names”? Proper name searches are one of the most popular searches that people do on search engines right? What are five top things that you do on the internet nowadays?

1. Check your email
2. “Google” someone
3. Read news on how McCain is losing in the polls
4. Check your flailing stocks
5. Facebook (has that become a verb yet?)

That is just my list but is probably true to a certain extent. I think I must Google someone at least once a day and people are always looking for lost friends, loved ones, and classmates. Google a while back made a decision to scrub all paid sponsored listings for any “Proper Name” searches. Why would you turn your back on all of the revenue that could be made from those searches? There must be millions of searches a day on people’s names that Google could be monetizing and they use the excuse that users complained that there were paid ads on their names and that Google was invading their privacy. Couldn’t they just create rules around advertising on “Proper Names” so that they weren’t deceptive or confusing as to what the product offering was?

Just imagine how many advertisers would probably like to advertise for Proper Names such as public record companies, White Pages companies, Reunion, Classmates.com, Friends Reunited, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, LinkedIn.com, ZoomInfo.com, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Just do a search on Google for “Neil Clark Warren“, shouldn’t there be ads for books on Dr. Warren, links to eHarmony.com, etc. Neil Clark Warren is the founder of a very popular online dating service, eHarmony.com. His name alone probably gets searched 1,000’s of times a month for people doing research on his Relationship Compatibility Test.

Now if you do that same search on Yahoo you will see a full marketplace of ads on Neil Clark Warren and guess who is buying an ad? Yup, Amazon.com and a couple other book stores since he is a published author. Is this finally making any sense to you? The only sense I can gather from it is that Google thinks that they should be able to get you all of the information you need on people in their natural search results even though most of the public record information isn’t crawlable content on most websites.

For full disclosure on the topic, I used to work for a public records company that spent a good deal of money on public name searches and when Google made the decision to remove all proper name searches they weren’t too happy. I currently don’t have a client that buys proper names but still to this day can’t understand why they are still not allowing advertisers to buy generic names. Instead, we have to read IMDB and Wikipedia listings on people if they are important enough to have a page created on their name. Come on Google, get with the program dude.

-Brian R.

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