Google Is Going Postal In Sweden

An anonymous reader writes "Google will start to collaborate with the Swedish Postal Service (Swedish original) to sell direct marketing to small businesses, both in the form of fliers (delivered by the Swedish Postal Service) and keyword advertising in Google Search. The area of distribution for the fliers is selected in Google Maps. Google will also will provide templates for the design of the fliers.The idea was concieved within the Swedish Postal Service."

Don't be evil?

[dangitman]

Encouraging the wasteful printing of advertising material and the associated wastage of fuel to deliver it, and annoy people in the process? That's not really a good thing to do. I thought the whole deal with the internet was that we didn't need to send send information on a physical medium.

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[cappp]

I wondered about the same thing, but then I got thinking about language specific ads - Google pretty much has the English language ads business neatly sorted out. The only real way to expand is to access the smaller western markets where ads can make a decent payout and it's worth the hassle of translation and so on. Wiki claims there are 10 million Swedish speakers and, rather importantly, that Swedish is mutually intelligible [wikipedia.org] with both Norwegian (5mil) and Danish (6mil). That's another 21 million speakers they can access, a tiny market sure but one that's otherwise probably going untapped. I imagine that gives Google some great access to native speakers and therefore the ability to increase the reliability of their translation programs and other beneficial knock-on effects.

Re:Please not more fliers... please!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Have you tried simply putting up a "No flyers please" sticker ?

This works too well where I live: my girlfriend didn't receive her IKEA catalog, one "flier" that she wanted. So she took the sticker off our mailbox.

People here who deliver fliers tend to be unemployed, trying to make a few Euros with honest grunt work. So I have a heart for them, and don't mind tossing the 139th pizza service flier into the recycling bin.

However, if the postal service starts conniving with Google to deliver fliers here, the sticker will go up again.

Re:Huh, Google getting help?

[cappp]

Huh, this I did not know. Surely you need someone to sit down and create your great list of synonyms and word links specific to each language? I had always assumed Google sold a word and then all those words "adjacent" to it - so looking for "parcel" would also bring up searches for related close terms like "brown paper", "string", "shipping", and so on. I'm guessing thats wrong?