AdSense has always been ideal for small blogs as barrier to entry is so little. As long as you can get some traffic going, you can start making money right away, albeit probably not much in the beginning. However, there are changes in Google’s AdWords program that may tip the scales in favor of the bigger, more established websites. From Google’s Adsense blog:
“One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser’s keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you’ll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.”
Google contends that this will mean more relevant ads for your site’s visitors and increased advertiser confidence, resulting in greater ad spending. These may be true, but mostly for those sites that are already popular. It remains to be seen if this will lead to a major shift in advertiser preference (big sites vs long tail). I guess it will all depend on this new model’s effectiveness.
“In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.”
With this recent development, I see scraper-type sites nearing their extinction. As for blogs, they will now have to be more competitive with their site branding to get noticed, and targeting a lucrative niche will become even more important. Google’s certainly keeping us on our toes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have to look for a purple cow.
Will the new search engine that being discussed throughout search engine forums be able to topple the giant?
The Name
Well let me start off by saying the name alone is a loser in my eyes. Im not sure the term “Cuil It” will be replacing the more elegant souding “Google It” anytime soon. But that isn’t to say there still isn’t hope for this new competitor.
“Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.” – Cuil.com
Ok so there is meaning behind the madness but people aren’t necessarily harping on meaning. People like names that are catchy and that can roll off their tongues. 1 point Google, no point Cuil.
The Design
The homepage leaves much to be asked for with a black background (cmon guys we all know that a black background will not appeal to the masses) with blue and grey text. I would have to say it looks more industrial than anything search engine related, but let’s not stop there.
Next let’s take a look at an inner page. A simple search for “php tutorials” produces the following:
Now I know change can be good but when it comes to people digging to find a solution in as little time as possible then the organization of the results must be in a highly user-friendly and familiar format. Cuil fails to achieve this with their column laid search results.
What do you think?
I have merely scratched the surface on my Cuil.com review and am now opening it up to you all to let us know your view on the different aspects of it. Feel free to pay Cuil.com a visit then share your views with us.
Everyone has been saying that Knol is the new Wikipedia. But is this comparison fair — or at least accurate?
I’m going to tell you what I think.
Knol is the new Squidoo
Let me tell you why I think so:
With so many similarities between Knol and Squidoo — and so many essential differences between Knol and Wikipedia –, I must return to this post’s title: why is Knol compared to Wikipedia? And why isn’t it compared to Squidoo instead? (more…)
These last days have been extremely exciting for everyone who follows Google-related news. Speculations on Digg’s acquisition, experiments with a Digg-like interface, the release of Knol… Yes, the “googlesphere” is a hot place to be right now. And it seems that things will become even hotter in the very near future: Matt Cutts announced an upcoming toolbar PageRank update. Here’s what he commented on his own post:
I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks.
Oh, really? As if we all didn’t have enough to discuss already. Not that we should complain. Much on the contrary: Google news are always welcome, especially when they come from one of the most reliable sources available on the Internet.
And if you’re preparing yourself for another whining season due to decreased PageRanks, you may have a surprise: of course many sites will be penalised as usual… but many others will have their penalties expired!
I don’t know about you, but I can’t hardly wait for this PR update. I’m sure we all are going to have a nice time browsing through forums and blogs, keeping track of the changes, speculations, predictions, complaints, success stories and all that stuff that makes a webmaster’s life funnier.
There are a lot of reasons to like LinkedIn. It has a clean interface, it’s easy to navigate, and you get the opportunity to network with various individuals to enhance your business (something that used to take thousands of dollars to attend conferences and a good number of hours burned on the golf course). Last year, LinkedIn grew by a phenomenal 319%, and by latest estimate is now valued at $1 billion. Clearly, the people behind it are doing something right.
LinkedIn’s most recent project is DirectAds, a way for members to post their own text ads on the website, and it really looks promising. See, the great thing about LinkedIn is that compared to Facebook, the average member age is older and the average income is certainly much higher. It’s an extremely targeted form of advertising to business professionals – the movers and shakers. Furthermore, the ads can be tuned to appear to a specific age range, gender, industry, and seniority. If you haven’t signed up with LinkedIn yet, you might want to take a look around.
There are a few things to note about DirectAds:
So far it all looks great on paper, except that if I was an advertiser, I’d be more comfortable if they used the CPC model (cost per click). Anyway, reviews will start to trickle in once more people start using it, and then you can decide whether it’s a worthwhile ad platform for your business. As for the site itself, it seems like it can only get better.
For a number of months, Twitter has been the darling of the technorati. It was simple, easy to use, and most of all, it was addicting. For marketers, it was another way of tapping into conversations, and knowing what was hot in the eyes of the twittering public. News had a way of breaking out fast in Twitter, and people talked in a very raw, informal manner that’s valuable if you need to see real trends as they unfold. (more…)
What lies ahead for local search engine technology?
No topic has received as much coverage recently as that of �local search� – the ability to find search results that are targeted to a users geographical preference. Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves are all making impressive advancements with local search, but there is another company that is vying for the local search crown.
InfoSpace is best known for its search engine brands like Dogpile.com and Webcralwer.com, but the company is building a reputation for itself as a provider of local search results, while at the same time building useful applications for the mobile user. As part of Andy Beal�s continuing look at �the future of search technology�, Andy had a chance to ask Arnaud Fischer, previously AltaVista product manager from 1999-2001 and currently leading search product planning for InfoSpace’s Search & Directory division, some questions about how local search will develop in the future.
Online yellow pages and white pages
[Andy Beal] InfoSpace recently re-aligned itself to serve online yellow pages and white pages customers. Can you tell us what most excites you about this space?
[Arnaud Fischer] I am most excited about the “local search” opportunity. Inktomi, Google, and others already serve country-specific search results today and geo-targeting at a more granular level will unlock a tremendous amount of value for local advertisers, in addition to serving more relevant content to end-users. The traditional yellow pages market is roughly a $25 billion a year global industry. Many small businesses are awakening to the efficiency and predictability of online marketing, increasingly shifting marketing budgets to Web search and Internet yellow pages. Unlocking that opportunity is no easy task, though.
Internet yellow pages sites such as InfoSpace.com and Switchboard.com are working hard to deliver an end user experience that will bring more of the billions of annual print YP (yellow pages) look-ups online. With the penetration of broadband, always-on Internet connections growing and increasing adoption and use of ‘data-friendly’ mobile handsets, the print yellow pages appear to be on the verge of becoming obsolete.
Some of the challenges
[AB] What are some of the challenges search companies face with local search?
[AF] Search engines are developing ways to disambiguate and adequately address location-specific queries. Geo-targeting Web search content, both organic and paid, requires search engines to better understand users and queries, inferring local intent by extracting geo-signals and leveraging implicit and explicit user profiles. Taking local search marketing services to market is also very different than selling paid listings to online businesses. The vast majority of local businesses still don’t have a Web site, nor the time and expertise to invest in managing sophisticated auction-type listing campaigns.
Paid inclusion services
[AB] There’s been a lot of discussion recently about paid inclusion services, where do you see advancements coming in this area?
[AF] Search marketing should keep evolving very fast this year. Although pay-per-click platforms have expanded match type flexibility, campaign targeting is growing beyond keyword analyses to include geo-targeting and day-parting. Search engines are leveraging smarter linguistic technology, concept extraction and contextual categorization, to optimize targeting of paid content, improving on relevancy, conversion rates and increase advertisers’ ROI. While advertisers might be losing control over guaranteed placement over time, paid search has made budgeting for traffic-generation programs increasingly predictable. Effectiveness metrics are evolving from impression counts, and click-through conversion rates to more sophisticated return on investment (ROI) methodologies. Some engines already provide advertisers with tools to calculate conversion rates from impressions to orders and ROI metrics.
Overture and Google go one step further, suggesting forecasted traffic levels and cost estimates for specific keyword combinations, match types and bid amounts. In a yield-driven context, where content targeting gets more sophisticated and matching more scientific, Paid Inclusion and Paid Listing programs will eventually merge into more automated bid-for-traffic models. Ultimately, advertisers will target impressions by dictating an ROI level acceptable to them such as “8% over advertising spend”. To meet these requirements, search engine marketers will increasingly rely on automation tools to target the right content to the right users at the right location at the right time.
Beyond the next few months
[AB] Let�s look beyond the next few months, what advancements do you see in the coming years?
[AF] One of the most significant developments currently underway in web search is the integration of search capabilities within a broad range of other services. Increasingly, this trend in creating a new competitive arena in web Search that is forcing established providers to adopt new strategies and creating new market opportunities.
As the #1 web application, search is becoming more ubiquitous as technology and business models mature. We are seeing more ISPs adding search capability to their portals; we are seeing more newspapers and community-type portals integrating local search and Yellow Page offerings as well, in order to retain users on their properties, and leverage what has become a very profitable business model.
InfoSpace has long offered its web search and online directory capabilities on a private-label basis that allows our distribution partners such as Verizon, ABCNews, FoxNews, and Cablevision to deliver these services under their own brand. The increasing level of search activity occurring at popular destination sites like these has been a key component of InfoSpace’s growth over the past year. In January, we announced that distribution revenue accounted for over half of InfoSpace’s search-related revenue in the fourth quarter of 2003.
The next big thing
[AB] We hear in the news that desktop search is going to be the next “big thing”, who do you see as being the key contributors to this area of search?
[AF] Both Microsoft Longhorn and IBM WebFountain will eventually make search a lot more transparent and integrated to end-users’ broader task-centric activities.
The Microsoft Longhorn operating system will have a significant impact on the overall information retrieval discipline and how users search. Microsoft is building centralized storage architecture around the next version of Windows that will make it much easier for end-users to retrieve locally stored information, no matter which application was originally used to author it. The subjective nature of users’ intent when formulating queries is complex. A better understanding of the task surrounding a search could make strides into serving more relevant results. The desktop and associated applications add a level of understanding of the user context that a browser cannot match. You could envision a world where users working on a document in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, get presented relevant related content leveraging text analytic technologies extracting concepts and themes of the document being worked on in real time. This is query-less search, relevant, in your face, all the time, without user interaction.
IBM has also been quietly working on the next generation of search technology focusing more on text analytic solutions, leveraging what some call the “Semantic Web”, including natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. IBM’s WebFountain technology goes beyond crawling and indexing the Web for the mere purpose of returning relevant links for a given queries. The technology actually tries to make sense of massive amounts of structured and un-structured content, extracting knowledge from the Web, Intranets, chat rooms, message boards, blogs, to isolate insightful and timely information that is not readily perceptible or available today. Applications could include identifying trends, monitoring brand perception, competitive activities, and monitoring other concept-specific “buzz”.
Commercial searches and informational searches
[AB] Let’s look at commercial searches and informational searches; do you see the two becoming distinct categories?
[AF] No. A central theme behind classical information retrieval theories is that users are driven by an information need. More granular search log analyses over the past years have attempted to categorize queries as “transactional” (Commercial), “informational”, and “navigational”. The immediate intent behind “navigational” queries is to reach a particular site; “informational” queries aim at acquiring information assumed to be present on web pages; while “transactional” queries usually result in some activity such as an online purchase. Andrei Broder, while chief scientist officer at AltaVista in the late 90’s demonstrated that queries at the time were roughly split equally among each category.
We don’t live in a binary world where queries (or content) are either inherently commercial or purely informational. The commercial-informational dichotomy looks more like a spectrum to me, where understanding user intent and the psychology of purchasing cycle is critical. The definitions behind commercial and informational content are fuzzy and personal; content perceived as purely commercial by some might be informational to others and vice versa. Clearly, the query “1819 treaty manuscript” could be considered “informational” in nature, but leading to a book purchase at Amazon about the United States-Spain treaty of 1819, or even the schedule of a trip to Spain or Florida.
[AB] So what’s the answer?
[AF] In focus groups, users have told us unequivocally that they would much prefer a search engine display an array of content types that may be relevant to their query, rather than try to guess what their intent was. Users also appreciate having tools available to help them narrow their results. Based in part of this feedback, InfoSpace worked with Vivisimo last year to deploy a ‘Refine Your Results’ feature on our three owned and operated search properties — Dogpile, WebCrawler sand Metacrawler. The feature automatically organizes and groups results by category for every search, providing a comprehensive view of web search results and allowing users to more rapidly get to the information most relevant to them. For example, a search on “flowers” groups results into subcategories such as delivery, gardening, arts and crafts, and more.
Reduced privacy and search habit monitoring
[AB] If search engine users gave up a little of their privacy and allowed their search habits to be monitored, would this allow the search engines to provide better, customized results?
[AF] There is no doubt that sharing personal data with search engines would result in better individual search experiences. The quality of search results is a function of two sets of variables: i) the user query and ii) the content indexed. Search engines are constantly crawling and indexing more web pages, more often, leveraging better entity extraction and concept recognition techniques, inferring document relationships in smarter ways. An enhanced understanding of user intents would certainly unlock more value from this semantic understanding of Web content.
Link analysis and other “off-the-page” ranking criteria have played an increasing role in relevancy algorithms over the past years. Monitoring navigation behavior at a user-level could conceivably be the basis to developing an understanding of users’ individual interests over time, in essence personalizing the equivalent of Google’s PageRank scores. If you consistently browse music-related content, search engines should become smart enough to understand that your query “Prince” most probably relates to the singer than to the royal family. Personalizing search relevancy algorithms presents some major scalability and performance challenges, though. It takes days, if not weeks to process link analyses and compute authority scores for individual Web sites after a crawl.
Privacy fears
[AB] Do you think search engine users will balk due to privacy fears?
[AF] Privacy concerns are certainly legitimate to some extent. I actually see some parallel between users� reluctance to using their credit card online in the early e-commerce days and giving up personal information to search engines today. It�s a constant trade-off between privacy concerns and the added value extracted from that data.
In the meantime, IP-sniffing technology might take search engines a step closer to personalizing search results without requiring users to compromise on very personal information. IP-analytic software associate internet-connected devices to geographic areas, domains (.com, .edu, and .gov), ISPs, connection speed and browser types with some level of confidence. Analyzing click popularity at an aggregate level along IP-associated parameters could be leveraged to extrapolate personalized ranking for clusters of users exhibiting similar behaviors. This technique would not be unlike Amazon�s implementation of collaborative filtering technology, in essence also reaching similar goals than social networks such as Eurekster.
Search on cell phones?
[AB] InfoSpace also offers wireless data applications. Do you think that search has a future on a cell phone?
[AF] Sending local content such as yellow page listings, directions, maps and business ratings to mobile devices just makes sense. I remember looking up on my cellular phone the nearest ice-cream parlor from the park a couple years ago with my kid. It worked! The experience was far from optimal, though, scrolling through about 10 to 15 screens I could barely read. Personalization features, geo-based services, faster networks, better handset resolution and color displays should significantly improve the experience over time. The navigation schema, whether search or browse modes, will be critical to make cellular phones a viable platform for both end-users and IYP advertisers. About 90% of mobile phones will be Web-enabled by 2006, making it a more attractive platform for content providers, developers, and information architects to invest time on.
The opportunity to deliver Web search and online directory information to mobile devices is something InfoSpace is well positioned to capitalize on. InfoSpace was a wireless data pioneer in the US and our mobile division today powers wireless data applications for every major US provider with the exception of Nextel. Going forward, we see a significant opportunity to increasingly combine our mobile and search and directory assets to accelerate the adoption of thee services on wireless devices.
[AB] Thanks Arnaud for taking the time to share with us your thoughts on the future of search!
Author Bio:
Andy Beal is Vice President of Search Marketing for WebSourced, Inc and KeywordRanking.com, global leaders in professional search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine marketing advice, Andy has had articles published around the world and is a repeat speaker at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conferences. Clients include Real.com, Alaska Air, Peopleclick, Monica Lewinsky and NBC. You can reach Andy at andy@keywordranking.com and view his daily SEO blog at www.searchenginelowdown.com.
Using Google
Thanks to a unique algorithm that produces most relevant results to any given query, Google has become, indisputably, the best search engine on the Internet. On the last count, Google has indexed over 4 billion pages and tackles around 200 million searches a day! A cluster of 100 thousand servers are used to store, crunch and spew out the query results with lightning speed that you are so accustomed to see.
This phenomenal growth has made Google from a garage startup to an Internet behemoth faster than any company has done before. The prodigies behind this unique search engine, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the process already got enlisted themselves in billionaire club.
Google is no longer a mere search engine! It is increasingly broadening its offerings to include great new services and excellent tools. Among these services, most notables are News
– a news aggregation and searching service, Blogger
– an online journal-keeping solution, Froogle
– a marketplace for comparison shopping, Groups
– online discussion groups, Answers
– a place to get hard-to-find information for a price, etc.
Google also recently unveiled two more programs. Orkut – a social networking service and Gmail – a free web mail service. Orkut is an online community, where a person can participate in it by invitation from a member only.
If you constantly frown over limited space of your hotmail or Yahoo accounts because they get filled up with junk mails and force you to delete old messages frequently, you will love Gmail with its 1 GB of storage capacity. There are several great features available in Gmail system too. One of them, dubbed as Conversations, allow you to view all exchange mails with somebody, once you select one of the mails. Sorting and searching emails also become much easier with Gmail. The only catch is Gmail displays relevant ads – based on the keywords found in your email – on the right side of the screen when you view an email, much like Google displays ads when you view search results.
Although, Google is constantly adding new and extremely useful features, most of us unfortunately do not use all the capacities of the search engine itself. The following tips will make your Internet browsing more effective if even you are an avid net user.
Choose most specific search words
Google returns web pages that contain all the words in your query. If you would like to see the most relevant pages on the first page of your search result, be very specific with your choice of words. For example: if you would like to research on former NHL hockey player Makarov, you should start your search with Makarov not hockey player. Even better if you search for the words: hockey player Makarov. Because just the word Makarov will show web pages on “Makarov” a Russian-made handgun and numerous other people and products with the name Makarov. Refining your query in Google means adding more specific words to your initial search. In this example you will hit the right web pages if your search contains: NHL hockey player Makarov.
Sets – a new feature
What if you are looking for a pair of Valentino designer jeans but can’t recall the name of the designer? Query on Italian designer jeans may bring you the right result; however, there is a better tool that Google is planning to implement soon, called “Sets”.
Fill up the names of some designers that you remember in the given form such as Levis, Wrangler, Versace and click either of the two buttons and voila! You will get a list of designers name and probably, Valentino will be there. But bear in mind that this feature is still at Beta stage.
Calculator
The other day, I was sitting in a colleague’s office. She needed to calculate some basic stuffs and looking for her calculator on her desk. Much to her dismay, she could not find the calculator and started to fumble through her computer programs in her attempt to find Microsoft calculator. I noticed that she was online and the browser was open. I, politely, asked her whether she knew that Google could actually calculate most common mathematical expressions. It came out to be, she did not! She was just amazed after trying it herself. Google is even capable of unit conversion!
Give it a try!
Definition
If you are looking for a definition of a particular word or a phrase, Google is the best place to get it. In Google search box, write “define: the word or phrase” without the quotation marks and click search button. If there is a definition available for your search term you will, most certainly, get it. It’s a very useful feature for students and people, those who write research papers.
Synonyms
You may think that search engines are too dumb to show query results of the synonyms of your search term. It’s not so! At least, in the case of Google! If you use tilde “~” in front of a keyword in your search term, Google will bring results on the synonyms of that word as well.
Searching within a website
Another great feature of Google search engine allows you to make your query within a specific website. First you write your search term in the Google search box and then write “site: the website or domain name”. For example: if you are looking for word “Microsoft” within the website www.micromedia.com you will write: Microsoft site: micromedia.com.
Check backward links to your website
If you have a website, Google search engine also has a nice feature to show you which web pages are linking to yours. In the search box, write: Link: you website address.
Other important tips to remember
There is no need to use “AND”. Google always relate all the words in a search term with Boolean “and”.
However, if you would like to make your query for two words – one or another – you can use “OR”. You have to write “or” in capital letters to give it Boolean value.
Google is not case sensitive. You can write your search terms either in capital or in small letters. You can even mix them up.
Google omits most of the very common words, such as the, in, etc. If you, indeed, need to add a specific word forcefully, use plus (+) sign in front of that particular word. Same way, you can exclude a word from your search expression by putting minus (-) sign in front it.
If you would like to make a search on an exact phrase or expression, put the words within quotation marks. That way, your search result will show only those pages where the exact expression was found. In order to search the phrase: For whom the bell tolls, write “For whom the bell tolls” in the search box.
I’ll also suggest you to download the Google Toolbar. Apart from the search box and its ability to block pop-ups, Google Toolbar also shows the pagerank of the website you are visiting now. Pagerank is a system of evaluating web pages – developed by Google founders and used as the core of Google’s search engine algorithm. The Toolbar also includes feature with the ability to fill up online forms from stored information automatically. You can also keep your daily journal or blog right from the toolbar.
Summary
Much to net users delight, Google, in accordance with its ambitious mission statement to organize world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible, so far doing a great job by providing us the best search engine and extremely handy features and services. We can only hope that the flow of innovative ideas from Google will not slow down in future, when it becomes a public company.
Author Bio:
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at nowshade@rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com.
Nigritude Ultramarine
Search engine optimization experts are having fun with Google. Experts, with DarkBlue.com at the helm, are holding a contest to determine how Google really works. Experts are competing, with the goal of optimizing a webpage for a non-sensical phrase: ‘nigritude ultramarine’. On May 7th, the day the terms ‘nigritude ultramarine’ was announced, typing the phrase into Google generated no search listings.
Search engine optimizers hoping to define themselves as industry leaders are all vying for the number one spot.
Others see the contest as an opportunity to test theories and experiment without jeopardizing existing traffic. Some webmasters are leery at staking their professional reputation on a contest with an undefined number of participants.
As an added incentive for search engine experts and webmasters to participate and work their magic, DarkBlue.com is giving away an Apple Mini iPod� and a Sony Flat Screen Monitor to anyone who can take their page to #1 for the phrase ‘nigritude ultramarine’. The contest is scheduled to run for two months and will conclude on July 7th, 2004.
Magical Phrase
The phrase generating the frenzy, ‘nigritude ultramarine’, is likely to bring out the best and the worst in optimization tactics. The black magic optimization techniques that are suspected in having sites banned from Google are likely to be exercised, along with tried and true optimization practices. Immediately after the contest was announced experts snapped up hyphenated domain names and began tweaking their text. Many experts were surprised to see how quickly ‘nigritude ultramarine’ made its way into the Google’s listings, with new listings appearing daily it is clear that the contest is well underway.
The experts will be at the mercy of Google and any new algorithms implemented over the course of the next two months. Experts will have to anticipate and update on a regular basis, to ensure that they are able to obtain and retain a strong listings.
Results
The results of the contest are unlikely to have any lasting effects, as Google will likely implement filters that will prevent search engine experts from reaping the rewards of any tactics that are found to be effective. Regardless the sense of adventure and a method of testing Google are intriguing.
Author Bio:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net
Google’s Books
Google is expected to open its books this week. Will it be revealed that they are making more money than they allure too?
No matter what the numbers say, other search engines namely Yahoo and Microsoft(MSN) are eager to find out what they are. Since the secretive Google has been able to hide behind being a private company.
They hope to find clues on what Googles profits are and possibly how much money Google spends on technology for their search engine. All in the desire to get their own share of the Online Search Market.
It is expected that Google makes more than they say each time someone uses their engine. Indicating that there is possibly plenty of cash for all interested in the search engine game. Even if they are smaller players offering ‘niche’ services.
Yahoo who has approximately 5% of a stake in Google, anticipates that there is plenty of room for both Google and Yahoo to thrive with search engine services.
Larry Page one of Googles founders told Reuters recently that he expects online search to be a “healthy market with many companies”.
Even Microsoft, seeing that Yahoo is breaking away from Google and coming up with their own Yahoo Slurp is also hard at work trying to design a better search engine in MSN and expects to offer a better way to search as early as July.
All this in trying to get a piece of the over $6 billion dollar search engine advertising pie. Plus the hopes of making search engine results more useful to surfers.
We all know that Google makes money with Google Adwords by displaying results along side or on top of search results. Now Google is announcing their own email service which will also provide even more revenue by having advertisements along side email messages.
The Security and Exhange Commission is most likely going to require Google to show their books. Since they expect that Google has over $10 million in assets and possibly over 500 equity holders.
The bottom line is whether Google makes an initial public offering or not. Their financial disclosures will hopefully show that there is plently of room for all to have their share of the search engine market.
Author Bio:
Jim Hoffman is owner of Inet Goodies. An internet help company offering SEO, Traffic, and Hosting solutions. http://www.inetgoodies.com
