If you type "BP oil spill" into Google, at the top of the list of results is a sponsored link taking you to the BP website, where you can find out, as the tag on the link says, "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill; Learn more about how BP is helping."
It's a page devoted to what BP calls the "Gulf of Mexico Response": there you can read BP press releases and find a list of useful numbers - which, perhaps unwisely, includes this one: "Do you have ideas to help us? +1 281 366 5511."
BP's investment with Google Adwords is unlikely to cost it much, but what other words, besides "BP oil spill", has the company arranged to have its link triggered by?
I tried some other combinations to see what made the sponsored link appear:
"BP oil disaster"... yes
"BP oil crisis" ... yes
"oil spill" ... yes
"BP" ... yes
"oil" ... no.
So has BP simply decided to have its sponsored link displayed every time anyone enters "BP", or key phrases like "oil spill", in a search?
Some further random combinations ("BP postman pat", "BP nicolas parsons") triggered a sponsored link in the column on the right of the main results; rather than in a highlighted box at the top of the main list. (It's a spot from where click-throughs would cost BP less than from the top of the main list.)
Hmm. So perhaps the rule is 'give us the right-hand link for any search with "BP" in it; and we'll take the more expensive spot at the top of the main list for "BP" plus some key words like "spill", "crisis" etc.'
Strange how Google can reveal the thinking of a corporation.
Another oblique insight into the mind of BP:
In 2006, Jonathan Dimbleby toured Russia for the BBC2 series Russia - A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People.
In his brilliant accompanying book, Dimbleby describes a visit to BP's facilities in Nizhnevartovsk in Siberia. There he learnt about a company-wide safety procedure introduced by the former chief executive Lord Browne:
It was called STOP, and required every employee to warn a colleague, wherever they were, if he or she was observed taking even a minor risk with their own or another's safety. This warning is administered publicly by raising one hand in the air in the manner of a traffic policeman and saying 'Stop'.
Each employee was issued with Stop cards twice a month, and each card had to be filled in to detail how its owner had - at least once before the next card arrived - stopped a colleague from taking a health or safety risk.
So pressing was the need to find transgressions that people were being 'Stopped' for walking down a staircase without holding the banister.
"You mustn't read as you walk [downstairs], nor use a mobile phone, nor carry any item that can't be held in one hand," a staff member explained to Dimbleby, who was so intrigued he decided to test the system by walking downstairs with a briefcase in one hand, talking into a mobile phone with the other.
Disappointingly, nobody stopped him. "Either standards were slipping," he concluded, "or they knew I didn't count."
With all this in place, it perhaps isn't surprising that BP contracted out the dangerous business of extracting oil to other companies.
