Thursday, February 20, 2003

SearchDay - Puzzling Out Google's Blogger Acquisition - 18 February 2003
This isn't the first time Google has purchased a web "community." Google purchased the Deja Usenet newsgroup archives in February 2001, and now runs them as "Google Groups." The interactive, often self-referential nature of many weblogs has many similarities to newsgroup postings.

Yet Google has said little about the Pyra deal, issuing a sparse 77 word statement to the media with few clues about the rationale behind the purchase:

"Google recently acquired Pyra Labs, developers of Blogger -- a self-service weblog publishing tool used by more than one million people. We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies. Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation. In the coming weeks, we will report additional details. Blogger users can expect to see no immediate changes to the service."

…it's possible to infer a few of the "synergies and future opportunities" between Google and Pyra Labs.

First, Pyra has over 1 million registered users, with about a quarter of those actively publishing weblogs. For the most part, these blogs are ad-free, offering an appealing distribution channel for Google's AdWords text based ads.

Second, Google could use the links created by webloggers to enhance its news service. Even though Google's news crawlers are constantly updating Google News' 4,000 sources of information, alternative internet sources are gaining a reputation for breaking important news stories more quickly than traditional media sources.

For example, the New York Times reported that the first hint of problems that doomed the space shuttle Columbia appeared on an online discussion eleven minutes before the Associated Press issued its first wire-service alert.

Intriguingly, news of Google's Pyra acquisition was broken by San Jose Mercury News tech journalist Dan Gillmor on his weblog, moments before Pyra CEO Evan Williams "announced" the news to the audience at the "Live from the Blogosphere" event via a projected screen from the presentation laptop -- by clicking a link to Gillmor's weblog!

Though weblogs are often compared to the frequently introspective and self-focused personal web pages hosted by Geocities or Angelfire, most weblogs are far more interactive, actively commenting on and linking to other web content. This commentary and linking behavior offers several potential benefits to a search engine like Google.

Weblog entries are often concise, pithy abstracts of other web content. In that sense, they function as an enhanced directory listing, of sorts.

Currently, Google and all other search engines look at the text surrounding a link to infer content of the page the link points to. With weblogs this text is often much more "focused" and can offer much more context about a page that's pointed to.

We've already seen Google experimenting with letting you see what the web "says" about pages, through its experimental "Webquotes" project available in Google Labs. Weblog postings could be a natural way to enhance these "quotes," potentially improving search results.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/03/sd0218-bloggle.html

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