“PC” is not an operating system.

I’ve uncovered a form of stealth advertising where popular subjects are linked to the thing being advertised via Google search results. The first thing I did when I saw that nasty little Windows logo over the large hadron collider control room page was to do a Google search to see if a place famous for free software use [2] had Microsoft on the brain. The results were surprising, to say the least.

What I found were a bunch of results implying a false relationship between the large hadron collider and Windows. The first and second result both have the text blurb, “Microsoft’s Windows 7 arrived in late 2009 and kicked off a PC upgrade.” What’s really sneaky about the ZDNet articles is that the quoted text is nowhere visible, it’s in the metadata like a porn page looking for search hits. There’s a link to a Microsoft Research page third, which lamely boasts, “A recent MSNBC story on the Large Hadron Collider uses HD View to show super-detailed photos.” Tech Blorge, Tech Republic, practical-tech.com, and data center knowledge.com also have advertisements and advertisements disguised as articles show up in the text blurbs too. One result from a Microsoft page mentions the large hadron collider in passing as someone tries to convince a forum member not to pave Xandros on the 701 EEEPC with XP. The first three hits look like an obvious attempt at linking Microsoft to a popular high tech project. The others are random but that random connection might have been the object of Microsoft’s massive advertising budget and the sites are Microsoft friendly if they are not actually part of the Microsoft “controlled press”.