BP spends a fortune 'managing Google'

BP has nontheless stepped up to the plate to take full responsibility for the catastrophe, so I don't where it matters who owns what out there.

Yet this whole PR campaign is just as slick as the oil it is based on - BP cannot be legally forced to pay more than $75 million as per the Oil Pollution Act (http://www.epa.gov/emergencies/content/lawsregs/opaover.htm).

So, drumming up a good image, promising to pay, yet not going to pay a farthing more than $75 million for a catastrophe that is going to cost billions and have a major negative impact on wildlife for hundreds of miles of coastline, in other words, business as usual.

Not feeling sorry for BP one bit.

BP hasn't been called 'British Petroleum' for a few years now.

39 percent of BP is owned by US investors.

The rig that that blew up was owned by a US company, not BP.

The wellhead and pipeline etc are not maintained or controlled by BP but by another (US) company.

I think they do. The Inq, is this worth doing a story on?

If I am searching for cheap flights, or pizza, or computer stuff, then if a company has a relevant advert it's possible it might be beneficial to me. If I was using an Ad Blocker then I wouldn't see that advert.

If it's something I am searching for, and the search engine knows my location from my IP, then it's possible that the search might be excellent and provide me with both low cost and a local provider.

I would like to see search engines work smarter and actually provide more of what we want and understand our search terms better.

An Advanced Search would be good, including options for:
"local shop is open now near you",
"in stock only",
"lowest price first",
"highest customer satisfaction rating first"
and some other choices I can't think of right now but I'm sure I would like! ;-)

Anyway, I regularly get emails from websites about offers, most of which I delete but some are telling me of deals on products I might be buying soon. Those are useful, an ad blocker or a hardline "no mail" attitude to retailers might block these emails.

A recent one is from Scan.co.uk who are selling a cpu mobo combo of Intel I7 920 and a gigabyte USB3/SATA3 motherboard for £303 inc VAT. Other sites have this for £50-£100 more.

Adverts can be annoying, but please consider if you might be missing something that might be relevant to you.

From what I have heard, scrubbing pelicans (or any other birds) usually results in their death anyway. It looks good, and gives off a fine air of "caring", but once the natural oils in their feathers have been removed by detergent they probably can't survive.

Seriously, we need a better way of motivating corporate decision-makers. At the moment, with the BP oil spill just as with the credit crunch, we are seeing the spectacular results of a "game" that offers huge rewards for successful risk-taking, but little or no penalty for failure. But, as all engineers and practical folks should realise intuitively, if a lot of people take a risk some of them are going to fail. We need a better way of encouraging decision-makers to invest more in avoiding failure. So far, the most effective method I have seen is the Chinese practice of simply shooting those who fail. Perhaps a subtler technique could be devised, but if not it would be a small sacrifice. After all, who needs decision-makers who make bad decisions?

BP can at any time blow the well and seal it completely.

But that would require BP to re-drill a new well and that would cost BP $$$. So rather then blow the well and seal it, they would rather try and capture the crude from the damages pipes.

More info than I've gathered elsewhere, though it's such a reprehensible disaster that I try not to learn more.

Preventable indeed... With AIG dumping BP stock and Obama giving that rig an award just prior, I'm leaning more to engineered disaster, though the goal of it isn't yet clear.

Meanwhile, BP executives should all be rounded up and put in Gitmo. If anyone should be, they deserve it, accident or not they're guilty of manslaughter. This is a bigger disaster than any "terrorists" have yet staged. Some action has to be taken other than money damages to a "limited liability corporation".

sorry the text editor and I fell out, in my post above the second half is a rewrite of the first half

GOM, from what I have read the BOP didnt take much damage because it offered no resistance. So far in the litany of failure we know that besides the failed hat-trick and zaney golf balls suggestion the BOP bore ram was incorrectly connected in the first place and besides unspecified hydraulic leaks elsewhere the shear ram was not up to spec and didnt cut the pipe. The well blew after they switched to seawater, too early apparently. Hence 11 men lost their lives and lawsuits are promised.

From a purely biological perspective they need an hermetic seal, I dont care how hard it is, it just has to be done and yesterday. BP engineers are currently adjusting the grommet on the lower marine riser package they deployed to the BOP. That is nearly a good piece of kit but its not complete and needed an insertion component and serious tensioning clamps of some sort if not remove the pipe head and bolt it down. In theory it only has to hold until the relief wells come into effect. If you think I am hard wait until Obama gets going, he is going to roast these guys as a political necessity. Oceanic BOPs and other well head systems are going to change as this system failed but safety and inspection will have to be beefed as some of the contributory factors were negligence of design and operation while some of it was allegedly down to a willful disregard for safety.

BP are trying to massage the perception of this and google are helping them because they have let money distort the reflection of the WWW which google presents to the public. Are they really any better than China?

btw Matt sincerely, you are right and no need to be defensive, we all should be more progressive on this issue. I am telling my own govt to get on with it given half a chance believe me. Economically I think Obama wins the argument renewables will be a good investment once paid for, but to bumpstart this he needs everyone behind him and pushing. He cant rule by edict in the land of the free. No two people see it quite the same way but the Governator and many other good people in the USA have tried to get things moving along though there has been a lot of attachment to the comfortable ways of the past. I appreciate its a sensitive issue but this incident may change the way people look at oil not only in the USA but also all over the world. It would be a fitting tribute to the 11 who died if it did, imho and not a betrayal as they were working to serve the energy needs of humanity in the final analysis and oil is not the only way of making energy, its just one of the most common and so cheapest by economy of scale but also its one of the dirtiest. Maybe its time to scale up something cleaner and safer.

From a purely biological perspective they need an hermetic seal, I dont care how hard it is, it just has to be done and yesterday. If you think I am hard wait until Obama gets going, he is going to roast these guys as a political necessity.

Oceanic BOPs and other well head systems are going to change as this system failed but safety and inspection will have to be beefed as some of the contributory factors were negligence of design and operation while some of it was allegedly down to a willful disregard for safety.

BP are trying to massage the perception of this and google are helping them because they have let money distort the reflection of the WWW which google presents to the public.

PS BP engineers are currently adjusting the grommet on the lower marine riser package they deployed to the BOP. That is nearly a good piece of kit but its not complete and needed an insertion component and serious tensioning clamps of some sort if not remove the pipe head and bolt it down. In theory it only has to hold until the relief wells come into effect.

PPS Matt no need to be defensive, I am just saying the US might want to take a leadership role here, is all, like we all should. I am saying the same to my own govt given half a chance. The Governator tried to set a good example and I hope other good people in the US can keep up the momentum. I appreciate its a sensitive issue but this incident may have an impact on the groundswell of sentiment in that direction. Economically I think Obama understands it would be a good investment once paid for, the pain is getting it up and running.

Kind of ironic that doing Google search on "oil spill" results in top sponsored links are anti-offshore oil advocates and Audubon's efforts!

An interesting parallel to BP's efforts at damage control.

I recently conducted a study (after this story, but before posting this comment) using similar tactics to see if the results were any different, this is what i found:

When searching for the term "BP are idiots" using google yahoo and bing i got the following results:

Google 1,590,000 pages returned, no sponsored links

yahoo 13,500,558 pages returned, no sponsored links

bing 3,000,000 pages returned, with 3 sponsored links pointing to:

British Petroleum·www.BP.com/GulfOfMexicoResponse
Get Info about the Gulf of Mexico Response Today

BP (Hiring)
Local Job Openings for BP Immediate Openings - Apply Here!

Hiring.SearchWorkListings.net

BP - Stock Quotes
The Latest Stock Prices/Quotes, Market Analysis and Company Headlines.

www.TheStreet.com

...to use ad blockers deserve to see all the misleading ads they get.

You sir, are a fucking moron if you think that what BP is trying to do is simple as "connect one pipe to another pipe incorporating an hermetic seal". I work in the drilling industry (30+ years) and there are many problems in doing this at 5,000 feet of depth. First, you are having to work remotely as there is no way for humans to work at this depth and everything is being done with ROV's. Second, a big problem with trying to get a hermetic seal on this is the fact that there is no telling the damage that has already been done to the casing and/or wellhead/BOP stack and if you put too much backpressure on it the well could possibly breach outside of the pipe and then you have absolutely no control over anything any more. Their present cap system is already at around the maximum capacity it can process right now and if you would try to choke flow down by closing off the rest of the relief ports on top on the containment cap, you could very well cause this to happen. Supposedly BP is building a better containment solution and is supposed to deploy it in the next week or 2, which should help in further containing the oil flow. They are also supposedly bringing in another ship or semi-sub production facility to handle more flow on the surface too. At least we in the business hope so as those BP shitbirds have fucked over everyone else in the industry with their cost cutting and shortcuts, which came back to bite them on the ass. Oil can be safely produced in deep water, but evidently not by BP because they have a proven track record of cutting costs and just paying lip service to safety and the environment. Don't let the actions of this British owned company fool you into thinking that the rest of the industry operates like them here in the Gulf of Mexico. Hopefully BP can start containing their mess much better real soon and keep their pollution of our shoreline and Gulf down to a minimum. The Mexicans did much the same thing as BP back in 1979 (Ixtoc I oil spill), but in much shallower water and the GOM recovered from it well. Hopefully if BP can minimize further oil discharging in the GOM real soon that this won't have even worse consequences to us here than what Mexico and Texas had from Ixtoc 1.

BTW, you really need to read up on some of the findings the preliminary Senate investigations are turning up on this. From what I've read so far shows that this was a totally preventable incident and only happened because of penny-pinching by BP and (somewhat) Transocean (a Swiss based company). 11 lives were lost and a gigantic ecological disaster occurred because BP decided to ignore clear signs that something was not right hours before the actual blowout.

As for the subject of this article, I just checked and only Google turned up sponsored links from BP. Yahoo and Bing didn't turn up any BP-sponsored links for me. So I guess that the BP bunch is spending most of their search engine monies with Google.

Doesn't happen in AU, nor, as far as I can see, in US. Doug seems to have it right. It's just home town marketing.

Google shows me AP, USA Today and NYT articles first, and plenty of pictures of oil-soaked wildlife.

I'm running Firefox 3.0 with Adblock Plus, so maybe that's the reason. Anyway, no pro-BP propaganda when I search for "oil spill"

While Google may have sold out, I did the same searches on Bing and Yahoo and the top results were from news companies. Also to the folks who want to knock the US for our oil use. Take a long look in the mirror, what percentage of your country's autos are 100% battery powered or are hybrids also lets not also forget, Robbie The Robot, that most countries or than Russia and China are a fraction of the size of the U.S. and in most cases are smaller than an individual states in the U.S. We're doing the best we can with what we have right now.

Never did.

Must be BP's attempt to hoodwink you Brits.

from both BP and Google.

Google is selling the internet, its motto of 'do no evil' painlessly diluted by a culture of amoral bright young things going about securing their win in the great game of life. Companies like BP are paying for that and their sins are becoming Googles.

But all that pales beside BPs pitiful failure to stop the leak and connect one pipe to another pipe incorporating an hermetic seal. A story of fail followed by more fail with more fail after that. Why are their engineers so incompetant? Can Lord Brownes beloved protege survive the debacle? Who was selling shorts on BP?

If any good can come of this I do hope it makes the USA think again about its fondness for oil and move ahead with development of renewable energy.

Also its mostly pelicans, btw, poor buggers. Pelicans, shrimps and Floridians. My sincere sympathies to all affected.