Why Google Bought Pyra

[Brett_Tabke]

A couple nice articles on Google bought Pyra [webmasterworld.com]:

Ny Times [nytimes.com]: Questions About Google Acquisition.

Wired [wired.com]: Why Did Google Want Blogger?

[born2drv]

So if Google is going to put more significant emphasis on weblog outbound links, does this mean I now have to be a blogger too, to keep my rankings high? :)

[vitaplease]

So if Google is going to put more significant emphasis on weblog outbound links, does this mean I now have to be a blogger too, to keep my rankings high? :)

Even though Google already follows blog links, that is a danger. With this extra emphasis (even if it would only be for sending out the Freshbot), blog spamming will probably follow guestbook spamming. Hunt the high PR ones and ruin them.

Interesting is that Google does index blog links, but - seemingly not - Google-group links. No reason usenet-type dicussion would be less interesting, Google just does not have a Pagerank mechanism to see if they could be authoritative.

[Brett_Tabke]

>blogger too

Yep, there is a major rush to blog going on. Unfortunatly for Google - all the action is in Moveabletype.

[satnavsys]

I thought google doesn't work well with weblogs:

[slate.msn.com ]

so perhaps google wants to separate them into their own search category. web-images-groups-directory-news-blogs. doesn't explain the buyout, but maybe that's the plan.

[ciml]

I don't see why the purchase needs to be related to Web searching.

People write blogs, people read blogs. Pyra can deliver many blogggers to Google just as Deja delivered many Usenet users.

[rfgdxm1]

I'm tending to agree with ciml here. As someone pointed out, Google bought Deja, yet doesn't even seem to be bothering to scan Usenet looking for links. Personally, I have always thought Google bought Deja because it had "geek appeal", not that it was directly profitable. Deja was mostly important because of the Usenet archives. The sort of people who want a searchable Usenet archive tend to be disproportionately "geeky". Usenet is more the turf of computer nerds than WebTVers. The reason why it is important for a search engine to appeal to the geeks is that the computer illiterate, or the marginally computer literate, tend to follow and do what the geeks they know in real life do. If those geeks search with Google, they'll think that is the way to search.

Thus, it is possible Google bought Blogger on the logic blogs are used more by the geek types. Also, it is possible that Google got a good price for Blogger, and is just trying to make a buck.

[egomaniac]

Maybe Google bought the engineering talent.

Software companies by other software companies for one to three reasons:
1) Access to customer base,
2) Software technology,
3) Engineering Brainpower.

If what the Dieselpoint guy said is Google's motivation, then Pyra's team might make a lot of sense for building more context searching techniques into Google.

I don't know much about blogging and the other blogging software companies though to know if Pyra was the best acquisition for such a purpose.

[Clark]

I had been thinking about this quite a bit and my speculation on it is that Google likes the way blogs use rss and xml and metadata and they have plans to supercharge blogger with some cool new tools utilizing this metadata and this may have a big effect on many things we do...