Realizing The Threat Of Google

Ramblings

from the they-control-everything dept

Following the big news of Yahoo buying Overture earlier this week, there have been hundreds of articles trying to decipher what it all means. I stand by some of what I said initially – that this could backfire, since many of Overture’s partners will consider themselves competitors to Yahoo, and will drop Overture the first chance they get. However, Yahoo has (hopefully) taken that into account, and still feels it’s better to be getting all the money from the paid-search results on their own site. Yahoo’s attitude should be obvious pretty soon after the deal closes, by looking at just how much they plan to promote Overture’s services for other sites, and how much they just focus on using it in-house. Meanwhile, the first analysis article that I’ve seen worth posting is from the Wall Street Journal, which takes a larger view looking at how Yahoo and others came to realize just what a threat Google is. Yahoo apparently only realized this when Google launched Google News. Microsoft realized it when someone pointed out that search was the third most popular task online, after email and instant messaging. AOL hasn’t realized it yet, but some feel they will soon. eBay and Amazon are both trying to figure out exactly what kind of a threat Google is. Of course, I still question how big a threat Google really is to many of these companies. If they stand still, maybe. However, if I were at these companies, I would look for ways to leverage Google to my advantage, rather than trying to compete directly with them. People like searching with Google – so it’s up to these companies to figure out a way to take advantage of that. Perhaps it’s building additional services around Google, or perhaps it’s making sure that it’s easy for anyone using Google to end up at your site.