Is Google Going into the Classifieds Business? - Is Google Doing Evil?
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A number of bloggers and more traditional analysts have expressed both excitement and concern over Google Automat. Personally, I’m really unhappy with the name. “Automat” sounds too much like “Laundromat,” and I don’t like the idea of Google potentially taking individual users to the cleaners. But of course, there are other possible issues.
Jeff Jarvis, in his blog Buzz Machine, raises an interesting question. “Here’s what I really want to know: if you create a listing, ad, or piece of content using this functionality, will it be addressable on the web? That is, will it be scrapable and searchable via other means? So if I create a job ad using whatever Google calls its geegaw, can Indeed find it? If I create, say, a restaurant listing and tag it as Mexican/New Jersey (something that’s too rare, by the way), will Technorati pick up the tags and IceRocket the text?”
If the content is not searchable, it might give Google an advantage, but it will have other effects, as Pete Cashmore observes in a comment to the blog entry cited above: “Yes, this may be Google’s attempt to own some content for a change – it’s very easy to switch search engines, but if Google could own data that the other engines can’t index, they’ll put themselves ahead of the game. Of course, this would also make them look like utter hypocrites…by trying to index everyone else’s data for free while keeping their own data under lock and key.” It seems to me that such a move would violate Google’s own “Do No Evil” mission statement.
Peter Zollman, executive editor of the Classified Intelligence Report covering this latest development from Google, said that the move was disruptive even if Google took it no further. “People in the [classifieds] business now have to assume that Google is coming at them full force.”
Michael Bazeley of Mercury News, however, had a ray of hope to offer. He believes that this could in fact generate more revenue for those currently in the classifieds business, particularly traditional publishers. He cites one possible scenario under which “online publishers could carry Google classified ads on their Web sites and share the revenue with the search engine firm.”
Some blog readers wonder, though, if this could be the start of something even bigger. “Lone Deranger,” in a comment to a Dutch blog named Seweso, had this to say: “There is much more to this than an ‘ebay/craigslist’ killer. This is the first part of Google putting ALL YOUR INFORMATION on line that you currently have lying around on your desktop. Before there was no way of doing this other than creating a website, which most people are too lazy to do…Oh, and guess what, once you have your documents uploaded on Googlebase, in a few months they’ll roll out Google Office and you’ll be able to edit them right there!”
Is this truly a move by Google to take control of all of the world’s information? That seems unlikely; the privacy issues alone are enormous, and the search engine is still being attacked in court over its digital scanning initiative. But it will be interesting to see whether a new service comes out of this patent application, and how the market reacts.
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