Google's Offspring: Taking Baby Steps

from the a-little-early-to-judge dept

Everyone's jumping on the Google backlash bandwagon, it seems. Business Week has an article which looks at two of Google's "offspring": Google News and Froogle, the Google shopping site, and concludes that they don't stand up to the competition. It's amazingly early in the game for them to judge that. Both sites are very clearly beta sites, and Google has a long history of throwing up ideas onto their site long before they're fully baked in order to get real users pounding away on them. It's way too premature to compare a Google News to Yahoo's News site, or a Froogle to a Yahoo Shopping site. At this point, I'd even say the two sites have different goals, and each do some things better than the other. What should perhaps worry Yahoo (and which pretty clearly does), is what comes out of these "beta" sites in a year or two.
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  • identicon
    LittleW0lf, 19 Mar 2003 @ 10:32am

    And the fact that the two's business models are di

    I love google, so maybe I am a little biased.

    However, the business models of Google and Yahoo are so insanely different that it is hard to believe that anyone has tried to draw comparisons between them. Yahoo is purely a business model, "lets see how much money we can squeeze from our users," while Google's model is "lets see how much involvement we can get from the user, and maybe make a little money on the side."

    Google news has no ads, a purely customer centric view, and consolidates the works of others into a nice, free-for-all format (obviously clicking on the link will bring up the full article, from the producer's website with all the ads.) Yahoo pops up ads left and right, and is extremely obnoxious about it, because after all, they have to pay for all the wonderful services they provide (sarcasm alert.)

    So the only comparison you could hope to provide is one between the two are their business models.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    ZeddZull, 19 Mar 2003 @ 4:51pm

    Dumb Comparison

    It is clear that the author of the article seriously confused the value of the different models. I use Froogle regularly to find the best prices on the Net for items from printers to toothbrushes. Google News is my start page. I check it to for a broad spectrum of news that often doesn't make it to the more conventional news sites.

    The author has been taken in by the slick marketing hype of storing credit card information and other personalization gimmicks that are almost useless. I don't mind storing my information at Amazon, but I don't want to be a captive to their limited catalog. If they have the best price, it will show up in Froogle!

    Score another for bone-headed analysis

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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