BP is purchasing search keywords such as “oil spill” on Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! in an effort to spin the ongoing clusterf**k in the Gulf of Mexico.
As noticed by the International Business Times and others, if you search on “oil spill” on Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, you may see a BP ad appear at the top of the results page. The ad points to the url www.bp.com/oilspillnews, where netizens can, in BP’s words, find “Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill” and “Learn More about How BP is Helping.” Yes, helping. And yes, those are BP’s caps:
Holy crap. I ran the Google Adwords for our company site. Points for BP on smart ad-buying, but really, this smacks of evil incarnate.