Google Australia is launching a new program to help Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) get on board with Adwords by offering them a free $75 search marketing campaign. This comes as Google saw its first drop in profits this year.
I don’t at all doubt Google’s intentions in trying to help out small businesses with advertising in the current climate, but there are also suspicions that it is a response to rumours that Yahoo7 are to also launch a similar free advertising campaign targeted at SMEs.
The Google Campaign will launch over the next couple of weeks and businesses who have not yet tried Google Adwords are eligible to apply before June 30.
$75 AUD is not much but it is a great opportunity for SME’s who have not dabbled in Adwords before to get a kick start in Search.
Julian Persuad, Head of Online at Google Australia said that “In Australia, we’ve seen strong growth in search queries over the past 12 months. Australians are going online to research their purchases more carefully, whether it’s a new lamp, a restaurant booking or a business stationery supplier.
What do you get when you combine Google Search with a solution to hunger – Hoongle; a search engine with a social conscious. For every search query entered into Hoongle, 20 grains of rice will be donated towards ending hunger through the United Nations World Food Program.
Hoongle uses Google to rout all search queries so everything remains the same in terms of search results, sponsored listing, except you add 20 grains of rice. Developed by undergraduates Vladimir Hruda, David Whitehead and Salmaan Ayaz at the University of Richmond, since it was launched in September last year it has generated 8.5 million grains of rice so far; that about 4,000 meals.
It’s quite similar to FreeRice.com; a not for profit initiative between UN World Food Program and Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Users on the site participate in a vocabulary game and 10 grains of rice are donated for every correct answer.
The Hoongle project however has the inbuilt potential for a longer life span because search engines (Google in particular) are apart of daily internet use.
According to a recent article in the NY Times:
The team said the search engine has about 90,000 users in 130 countries, and traffic to the site has been doubling every 2 to 3 weeks. The team has discussed rolling out versions in different languages and even implementing a version for the iPhone.
On average I would do at least 10 – 15 Google Searches a day; probably more. That equals 200-300 grains a day, which equals 6,000-9,000 a month, which equals 72,000 -108,000 a year, and so and so on. So get searching.
