Google Acquisition of Social Analytics company PostRank

More emphasis - or limitation - of social in search?

[bw100]

From [allthingsd.com...]

Google has acquired PostRank, a four-year-old social start-up that measures social media engagement for online sites, stories and authors. Not much of anything about the deal is being disclosed, besides that PostRank’s team will be moving from Waterloo, Ontario to Mountain View, Calif. to help Google with measurement for both its users and advertisers.

Considered in the context of +1?

[edited by: goodroi at 2:22 pm (utc) on Jun 7, 2011]
[edit reason] FixedLink [/edit]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hard to say but I highly doubt Google needed anything postrank had, besides the talent. It seems to be a strategical move to remove a potential competitor to Google's bread and butter(rankings) and eliminate the threat of a competitor buying the talent first.

Who knows, I just don't see a practical use, yet. Google may also be hedging their data gathering avenues a little further. I wonder if the fallout from Panda had any impact on that, a whole lot of annoyed webmasters might have caused the removal of anything google from a lot of places...

[muejl1]

I think you're right Sgt......I was reading about postrank and can't see a use at the moment, but who knows what Google's next move is.

I would be surprised if it had anything to do with Panda though......

[httpwebwitch]

Congratulations PostRank!

But I wonder, why move the staff to Mountain View, when Google already has an office in Waterloo? That's quite a disruption to their personal lives, to be acquired like you're a sports team and shipped off to a faraway place. I hope the deal comes with a sweet relocation package for all the staff and their families.

[superclown2]

Google (ie Page) want to absorb all the available talent. It will be interesting to see whether their Montessori principles will work as the google family turn into an intellectual leviathan.

The original investors had some clout and could insist on what they termed 'adult supervision'. Under the present system this is no longer possible because of some clever voting rights and Page can do pretty well what he wants to do regardless of how it affects anyone else, including shareholders. Webmasters of course are irrelevant in this hierarchy. This is what is unsettling investors since Eric Schmidt was replace as CEO; there is no longer 'an adult' in control.

Can Google keep om absorbing all these people without getting indigestion? If they can it will be a very exciting ride as all the old concepts of privacy, and copyright - those that are left, anyway - are further eroded and replaced with one universal repository of all the world's information.

This is just one more step along the road to Google's control of "data". This company will either become the biggest thing since the British Empire or be destroyed by governmental privacy concerns. I've no idea which will prevail, at the moment.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

superclown, you can't get destroyed by government when you need to work with them re: keeping military bases hidden from gmaps, keeping military and political figures off the radar from tracking, heck Google has eyes in space and gov has lots of toys up there... they have to play nice.

[FiveTone]

This could help Google grow their display advertising business much like acquiring Urchin helped grow their paid search advertising business. It probably won't affect organic search at all.

[weeks]

This could help Google grow their display advertising business much like acquiring Urchin helped grow their paid search advertising business.

This sounds right to me. It's likely that PostRank sold themselves to Google as much as than Google bought PostRank. Using the Google $ and brand as a base is a good way for the players at PostRank to move to the world stage with their ideas and talent. Thus the move to warm and sunny Mountain View.

[glenn]

PostRank states that off-site engagement now accounts for 80% of the attention your content receives. Google wants to understand and provide the impact of social marketing, especially when a recent Forrester Research / GSI Commerce report said that less than 20% of visitors who "like" a company's Facebook page ever return to it? This seems more strategic than meets the eye to me.

[Petrogold]

Hi Folks!
I saw it took a long time for the innovators to create a business plan that rocked the profit & revenue growth of any corp. Then a few greedy consultants come on board to show the ADM more aggressive business plans for higher growth, convince the lame Adm. to get their pay checks resulting to lose a huge money cost without any good achievement. Thus spending the good money for the bad projects. It is obvious that money grown has to be spent by someone else who never own any burden of the corp. while it was taking its striving growth from the scratch.So once will be the case of big bro Google. I could bet it!

[KanukBoy]

Am I missing something here? All posters so far seem to think not much about this.

If they can incorporate their technology into their algo, I think it can be the most profound enhancement since they began using links to compute page rank.

"Engagement points are the numerical values assigned to each type of engagement event. The more effort and engagement an event demonstrates, the higher the points value. For example, a highly engaged event like leaving a comment on a blog might be assigned a number of engagement points 10 times higher than a fairly passive event like a click or pageview."
[analytics.postrank.com...]

Sounds a lot like a page rank score calculation? Conveniently numeric so it can be algorithmized. Google has been trying to incorporate social signals but didn't have the data. Could this be Google's latest and best effort so far? It would explain why they move the whole bunch to Mountain View.