If I read this correctly, Google thinks it could capture 20 percent of the worldwide advertising market.
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The Google URL
Just saw something surprising on a Pontiac commercial: They flash the Google home page and say, “Google ‘Pontiac’ and find out what’s new,” or something like that. It went by in a second but I was amazed. Note that they didn’t say, “Go to Pontiac.com,” which tells me that they must believe that most people don’t put in addresses, they Google to get where they’re going. Once upon a time, sites tried to become keywords on AOL and then a few poor souls bought RealWords (that was what it was called, wasn’t it?). Those were closed taxonomies and their days are over. Google, of course, is open to influence. And so Pontiac is open to Google bombing. Imagine if Dell advertised to find its site via Google rather than an address. We could all link to this and it would be what’s new for Dell.
: UPDATE: Steve Baker says this is why he’s using Ask, instead.
Closed co-op?
Tell me if I’m wrong about Google Co-op — because it’s damned near impossible to tell what it is from their description — but it seems to be a closed system for enriching Google but not the internet. That is, it gets us to give Google meta data about sites that are supposed to improve their searches but, so far as I can tell, that data is not available to anyone else. Closed? Evil? You tell me.
Google’s syndication protocol
Maurice says that Google’s new syndication protocol, which I asked about yesterday, is an indication that Google is putting a gate in the wall around its garden to enable queries into its data. That would be good. But what it really should allow is not just queries into but scraping of its data for that data is our data that we put there in services like Google Base. Why do I care about this? So that new services can come along and aggregate distributed posts — classified ads, listings, reviews, whatever — wherever they are on the internet, in blogs, in other still-closed services, or in open blogs. Now that Google is trying to become a repository of our data, that should be open to the world to aggregate and analyze as Google aggregates others’ data. The Golden Rule of the Google Age should be: Scrape unto others as you would have them scrape unto you. I hope that’s what the new syndication protocol does but I’m still not sure.
Google officially enters the content business
The most significant news in Google’s launch of its finance service is that is licensing content from Reuters.
In each of its other endeavors — search, news, shopping, classifieds — Google has maintained an open, albeit uneven, playing field. That wouldn’t work in the case of finance because Google had to integrate data into its presentation and Reuters was wise and happy to sell it to them.
But what this means is that Google is no longer just an aggregator — which, I’ve argued, is a beneficial thing to be for content holders, because an aggregator makes links and links make traffic — but is now a destination that will hold users in and compete with other content.
Yahoo has been in this position for years, after it stopped being merely a directory and source of links (Jerry Yang once said at a meeting I attended that his job was to get people in and out of Yahoo as quickly as possible; that tune soon changed). Yahoo has licensed Associated Press wire content — over the objection of many of its members, for precisely this reason — and built a destination that tries to both keep people in and link out (see its new and rather uninspired local aggregator). The net result is that Yahoo is less effective at creating linked traffic than other portals.
Watch out as Google creeps, as Yahoo did, into the content business and competes with, instead of merely organizing, content. It’s a momentous move.
