Bentler - 5:26 pm on Feb 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

It may be that Google is positioning itself to host small business "storefronts" to plug into its Google Local using software similar to Blogger, probably morphing into an advanced geographic search product using technology from Keyhole. From what I can tell, Amazon/A9/Alexa has positioned itself for similar business, even going so far as to publish geo-coded street images and assign individual Web sites an asin.

The reason I think Google would consider this is that a huge amount of new business can be attracted in this sector, both on the hosting side and the advertising side, well within Google's overarching mission of organizing the world's information and making it easy to find.

Then again, maybe not.