chiyo - 2:18 am on Nov 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

I agree with Europe for Visitors. To me the whole analysis makes absolutely good sense.

I dont think people generally go to the Web in order to buy on-line. Even not in the US, and as far as I know that is the only country where on-line shopping has become even close to mainstream. They tend to go to find information. If on the side, through search engine PPC ads, banners and text ads on news/mag/guide sites, they buy things, thats great, and thats a good model.

Google just cannot reliably rank commercial/shopping/affilate sites. That has become more obvious over the past few months. Too many wannabees chasing after the same high potential keywords, with precious little differentiation or originality.

Instead of working on original content and new ideas, to them SEO is the best and sometimes only option, and both Google and the customer surely do not want to have sites at the top who are best SEO-ers. They want the best sites, however you may define "best" - credibility, brand recongition, range, prices, ability to pay for promotion?

Ive argued before that PR and link popularity just does not work with commercial sites or high-competitive searches. The natural "citation frequency" that is so good in finding niche and info sites, is almost useless for finding good commercial sites (for reasons outlined above), so these keywords are spammed out by articifical link popularity, nefarious cloaking, and short term cunning stunts.

I also argued many years ago, that the one-search-engine-for-all model has a limited product life span. Google proved me wrong in the short term... (in my own defence mainly because their competitors gave up through short sightedness, and Google's masterful "everyman" branding) but I still dont think the long term.

Google's move to developing Google News is one interesting development in this context.

Are they basically thinking that people who search in their main database are not really looking for breaking news, and that Google as a whole massive database, cannot provide it, seeing it is so epehemeral?

If so I agree with them.

So start a new database which is optimised for finding fast changing news content based on selected credible news sites.

So Google is moving to slicing out their news content to a different database, optimised for such content. No longer do shoppers have to worry, when searching for "blue widgets", to get the latest CNN news on "widgets Ltd. feeling blue - comes under earnings predictions"

Now amateur blog/news sites are complaining that because they are not in the News database, they are not in Google proper either. Another problem - but it underlines my argment that Google cannot be everthing to everyone but must slice out what we market researchers call "customer segments" based on their motivation for using the service.

Now this all leads to the next possible product being a shoppping search - paid for and ranked separately. Now there is a branding problem here as it conflicts with Google's "uncommercial" branding. But slowly Adwords is demonstrating to searches that you can have untainted info results with well separated commercial spins "on the side" (literally!)

And at the moment Adwords can offer commercial offerings well besides Google searches.

As soon as Google is convinced that a big enough segment of customers go to Google search and other general search engines to go on shopping expeditions, I am absolutely sure they will roll out "Google Shopping", just as they did "Google News" - as long as they can solve their branding problem - which to my mind is slowly being resolved with little by little changes to public acceptance that Google can go commercial but still retain its brand integrity..

On a personal note, I hope they dont, becuase we have noticed a major surge of interest in banner/text/sponsorship advertising on our news sites recently, as commercial operations lose Google rankings and PPc and PPI becomes respectively more expensive and more irrelevant, decreasing ROI for them, but increasing it for us!

They also have to do a competitive analysis. Are shoppers likely to go to google - or to specialised shopping portals (over various degrees) such as MySimon, Overture, vertical portals, specialist stores (Amazon, Toys for Us), auction sites like Ebay) and so on. Maybe the likes of Mall.com may even resurface as online shopping becomes easier, more secure, more honest and more culturally acceptable. Why go to a search engine when there are other specialised shopping portals.

So all a long way of saying that I agree with Europe....