Hasta La Creative!

Searching the web this morning for fun advertising news (using Google), I groggily checked out the advertisers that were vying for the top paid slots as was my usual habit. What I saw nearly made me spit out my coffee, and will be burned into the back of my brain forever: The number one paid slot on my Google search for “advertising” was none other than Yahoo! Sponsored Search?! Disbelieving my own eyes, I refreshed the page. Same result. Now fully awake, I ran the search again. No change. This was no fluke…this was real…Yahoo was paying for search on Google! I thought about all of the people that I should call to alert, but couldn’t think of a single one. So, I sat back and thought about it for a second.

Well, I reasoned, maybe Google pays for search on Yahoo!, as well. So, I decided to check it out, although I secretly scoffed at the thought of Google paying for search. But, I logged in to my Yahoo account anyway and searched for “advertising.” No Google in the results. Slyly, I typed in “Google” and hit search. No paid results for Google, although they occupied the top bazillion pages of Yahoo’s organic results.

And that’s when I noticed the innocent-looking words, right beneath the search bar, near the top of the results: 

“You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

A plaintive plea from Yahoo!, begging me to stay. So, I went to Google. Obviously, if Yahoo! is begging me to stay, I have no use for them.