Google goes physical
p2p news / p2pnet: Google is now The One online. Thus, it wants to extend its reach into the physical world and accordingly, "Google Space, at Terminal One of London’s Heathrow airport, will allow people to log onto the net and check e-mail while they wait for flights," says the BBC.
"For Google, the space will be used to test its myriad product launches on the public."
Product launches? But isn’t Google a search service?
"We see it as a huge focus group," Lorraine Twohill, Google’s European director of marketing, is quoted as saying. And depending on the success at Heathrow, Google could become a "recognised physical presence in airports, stations and even high streets around the world," says Twohill.
It’s all about advertising and through it, $$$ and, all Google products are interlinked, the BBC has her pointing out. "It all comes back to our core DNA of search" and, "As well as moving into a physical space, Google is also likely to make a play for our pockets too, with Ms Twohill earmarking mobile – alongside personalisation – as important areas for the firm in the future," says the Beeb.
So is Google a Microsoft wannabe?
"We are still a tenth the size of Microsoft and are not ready to be compared to them," states Twohill, carefully omitting the word ‘Yet’.
As Stanford graduate students "sketching out the idea that became Google," Larry Page and Sergey Brin, "sniffed in an academic paper that ‘advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers’," says an intriguing New York Times article.
However, as the saying goes, "Money talks and bullshit walks" and Google has become, "one of the biggest advertising vehicles the world has ever seen.,": the story says, continuing:
"This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner."
But, "Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries," observes the New York Times.
"Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.
"More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what’s for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google’s ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness – and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products."
Also read:-
BBC – Google extends searching offline, November 23, 2005
New York Times – Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too, October 30, 2005
