Google advertising on its home page

Google has always spoken of single minded consumer centricity when it comes to its home page, keeping it uncluttered and free of advertising: one big box to enter your search followed by usefully ranked results.

Apart from the occasional high profile advertising campaign, and the widening of the sponsored link column in search results, that Sepas spotted earlier this year Google have been pretty consistent about this.

So it is interesting to see a promo box for Chrome sitting on the home page.

A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that Chrome has reached about 3.5% of the browser market, which puts it on a par only with Safari, which must be disapointing for Google.  I guess it explains why they are resorting to their home page to help drive take-up.

I did a quick round up of the browsers a while back you can find here.  My personal favourites are Firefox for heavy lifting like ecommerse and Chrome for fun.