Google Stimulating Romance, French Pastries, "Search on."

As I was sifting through my Pinyadda feed the other day I clicked on an article shared by Reid Snyder (old friend of mine from Hamilton College, I recommend adding to your network on Pinyadda for sports, politics and/or business) from the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times entitled Why Do We Hate. Typically I enjoy all of the posts from the Freakonomic's blog, and I especially enjoy the discussions Reid and I often have on Pinyadda about items we share. However on this particular trip to NYTimes.com, it wasn't a story that grabbed my attention, it was an advertisement. Because of the ad, which you can see in the screen shot below, I didn't end up reading the Freakonomics post or discussing the item with Reid. I ended up watching advertisements promoting Google's search engine. Yes you read that correctly - Google, the company that never needed to promote its search engine through advertising and prided itself on having a minimal advertising budget, is now promoting its primary asset through banner ads.

Never have I thought I would need to be convinced to use Google as my primary search engine, but after watching the YouTube video that the banner ad brought me to, I found myself wondering if Bing and the vast assortment of real-time search contenders had the Google guys sweating. What I found particularly interesting about the Google ad, which you can watch below, was what they seemed to be selling rather than the fact that they were advertising. The ad, entitled "Parisian Love", is a 53 second story told through a series of searches that starts with the user searching for study abroad programs in Paris, leading to searches for advice on impressing French women, and ending with searches for churches in Paris and instructions on how to assemble a baby crib. As to be expected from a Google ad, it was clever, simple and enjoyable to watch, but it did very little promotion of any of the aspects of the actual search engine. Rather, the ad seemed to be more of a promotion for the general act of conducting a Google search, particularly angling for an emotional connection - in this case romantic - to what we have all become so accustomed to referring to as simply "Googling".

The ad, along with several others from the ad campaign "Search Stories", potentially suggests two things. First, Google may be starting to feel that the plain and simple look and feel of their search could be lacking in some personality compared to Bing's search, which has a new background image every day with four interesting tid-bits of information embedded in to each background image that take you to Bing search results pages for the information being highlighted. When I conduct a Google search, I typically have something in mind that I am searching for - and while I occasionally will get lost in a string of Google searches that lead me away from my initial search topic, it is rare that I kill time Googling. After visiting Bing today and learning about the Antonine Wall on what appeared to be Bing's version of Wikipedia pages, I could see why the personality and small bit of guidance for someone not actively hunting found on Bing can be valuable.

The second thing the ad suggested is regarding a more significant trend of how people are starting to get their information online rather than small user experience differences between search engines. With the rising popularity of social media and the "stream" concept we are starting to receive a good amount of content and information indirectly through people rather than through endlessly Googling things. As the web becomes more social and the implicit web continues to develop, what we now know as searching will seem relatively archaic compared to services that can deliver valuable information without having to be prompted. As social interaction on the Web increases, Google needs to be thinking about ways to increase user interaction in ways that will improve the information retrieval process beyond putting together nifty ads that create a fleeting sense of romantic connection to someone who Googled French truffle shops in order to impress a girl.

What are your thoughts on Google's ad below and on the future of how we will be finding and receiving our information in the future? Would love other's feedback in the comments below.