Search engine sideshows; product placement or data mines?

Posted on 17th November 2007 at 2:42 pm by Manley

Acquisitions. Everyone is making them, often with no obvious ROI.

Just why are the search engines diversifying so much? Can it really just be market dominance that is driving them?

Well no, of course it can't. Yes there is a lot to be said for getting into the position which Microsoft and Google have attained in their fields, but the expense of Google developing Google Docs, Yahoo! buying Zimbra or Microsoft's share in Facebook is too great for these to be prestige offerings.

Many of these sidelines have obvious applications for search. Mapping and virtual earth applications tie in nicely with local search, but there is more to it than just market share. There are three predominant factors driving these developments and purchases which immediately present themselves:

1. Product placement

Whilst relevance is still of the utmost importance to engines, the reality is that users tend to stick with the brand they know until they find that it is letting them down. Perceived relevance is important for keeping users and for gaining new ones, but if one takes the top 20 results for [credit card] out of Google, what you are left with is still relevant. With a large enough index and a half decent algorithm the main battle is merely avoiding spam.

Product placement, an array of tools and applications and a feeling that these all tie in together is all good marketing for a search engine.

2. Ad Placement

We all know how search engines make money. The more avenues for advert placement, particularly contextual advert placement, the better. This clearly explains acquisitions such as Facebook or Massive It does not go so far towards explaining on-line office suites or video and image sites such as PicasaWeb, LiveVideo or youtube.

3. Data mining

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

Shareholders' interests aside, I am sure that Google's aim is not so very different now than it was when Larry and Sergey were working on Backrub. Whilst I was busy blowing stuff up peacekeeping in the Balkans, Google's founders were working on a method for efficiently extracting relevant information from massive amounts of data. The more data available for processing, the better the relevancy can be, and implicit user behaviour data is just about the most valuable commodity a search or contextual advertising engine can buy.

Implicit user behaviour data, that is to say actual on-line activities, is so much more valuable than its explicit counterpart and, in this instance, explicit data does not just mean social bookmarking and Yahoo! Answers, but also includes back-links themselves.

I am not suggesting that there are not more genuine, opaque and valid reasons for the plethora of search engine acquisitions and applications (for example, corporate on-line office suites and search appliances can be (and are) charged for, and personal versions can carry ads in the future), but with Google's current war on paid-for links at the forefront of current industry news and the release of Platypus (the infamous Google G-Drive) appearing to be approaching at last, I cannot help but consider that the data available from Analytics, Adwords, Feedburner and Google owned site traffic might be the best way to combat link-spam whilst maintaining a semblance of relevant information recovery in an ever expanding ocean of data.

In essence, Google will not need to look at what we link to in order to gauge popularity, they will know what we like.

From here, could the next logical step be a Google ISP? Despite the joke and any official denials, I'd expect to see a full blown free Google ISP on the horizon. After all, Google is already offering free wifi and WebAccelerator which are capable of providing massive amounts of user data. Could market dominance finally kill off link spam?

File under: google acquisitions yahoo! msn ask

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