Outside Innovation

More Google Fodder: Microsoft and Google Battle over AOL

Today, Time Warner's board is meeting to discuss which of its two suitors it prefers for the stake of AOL that Time Warner wants to sell off. The rumor mill says that AOL will be reconstituted as a 50/50-ish partnership with either Microsoft or Google/Comcast. The outcome will be interesting for the press and the players. It may not make much difference to AOL's customers. But money will change hands and more ink will be spilled dissecting the final arrangement. The best coverage to date has come from David Vise at the Washington Post. In particular, take a look at the great graphic the Washington Post ran last Sunday, summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of AOL's suitors.

Google Enters Classified Advertising Business?

Yes, but...Think: Find and Filter Everything

This week, Google began testing "Google Base"—a mechanism that will make it easy for content owners to submit content to Google. The newspaper publishers quickly saw it as yet another threat to their classified ad revenues (of course, Google already is a threat to classified ads, particularly local ads—through its Google Local listings, which let you easily type in a location and quickly locate and click-through to hotels, restaurants, dry cleaners, lawyers, etc.).

What Google Base actually does is make it easy for anyone to upload content to Google to search. Instead of waiting for Google to spider your Web site—and only seeing the "outside-the-log-in" content—anyone will be able to post information directly to Google either an item at a time, like a car you want to sell or as a bulk upload. The terms of service for Google Base as reported by blogger Caleb Eggensperger are as follows: “By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, adapt, publish and otherwise use, with or without attribution such Content on Google services solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.”

Note that while Google Base will compete with Craig's List, eBay, and other places that people go to buy and sell things, it's not limited to things that are for sale. It can also be used as a way to upload research you want the world to know about, or data sets you've gathered. The categories for submissions listed so far include: Recipes, Course Schedules, Events and Activities, Housing, Jobs, News and Articles, People Profiles, Products, Reference Articles, Reviews, Services, Travel, Vehicles, and Want Ads. I'm sure that's just a sampling.

Google's Foray into Sort and Navigation

Here's what I think is really afoot. With Google Base, Google is accomplishing two much-needed goals.

1. An easy way for Google to acquire content legally. By making it easy for anyone to submit information to Google, the company circumvents all copyright protection issues. If I give it to you, you can search and display it. I—the content owner—control what I give you—full text/video/imagery or a description with a pointer. I can choose whether the item described in my Google Base listing is free or for sale. I can let you map it. And, I can tell you what metadata to associate with it and what categories it belongs in. That's where the real magic comes in.

2. An organic metadata/taxonomy creation engine. Google Base will no doubt be an open taxonomy/categorization engine that content contributors will be able to evolve. This will happen in much the same way that the blogging community is evolving the tagging for blog content and RSS feeds. We're weaving the semantic Web, collectively. For example, in the Google Base previews that people have posted, you can sort recipes by "time" and by "price." Presumably you'll also be able to sort by ingredients, fat content, fiber content, and so on. Who will "arbitrate" what categorizations are useful for each topic area? The community at large. I'm presuming that as people add metadata fields and taxonomy categories, others will be able to add those fields/categories to their listings.

The fact that you can sort the results of Google Base listings based on categories of metadata is a really important evolution of the Google search engine. Sorting and navigation have been the Achilles heel of this otherwise tremendously powerful and life-changing resource. As you'll see from this week's research reports, the biggest disadvantage that Google has, when compared with alternative search engines for enterprise use, is its lack of sort and navigation capabilities. Stay tuned...