Interview With Google's Eric Schmidt - Plus, Google Buys Another Company

from the all-about-content-creation dept

Here's a good interview with Eric Schmidt of Google where he sheds a little more light on the reasons they purchased Blogger. It's not really a surprise, but basically, they realized blogging was becoming an important self-publishing mechanism - and Google sees itself as helping the right people get the right information. Blogging is one method of doing that. On top of that, they found the Pyra team to be smart and on the same wavelength - so a lot of the deal was to get those minds into Google to help them there. Update: In other news, it turns out Google bought Applied Semantics today as well. They make software that is supposed to improve the relevance of advertisements - which clearly fits in with Google's new push to offer their ads on content pages. Also, this deal steals Applied Semantics away from Overture, who had been using their technology as well. The article says that the move is intended to hold back criticism that Google's new program for advertising on content pages isn't going all that well. From my own experiments, I'd have to agree. The clickthrough rates are significantly lower on content pages than on search pages - suggesting the targeting mechanism isn't as good as Google expected.
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  1. identicon
    Dan, 24 Apr 2003 @ 1:28am

    No Subject Given

    The clickthrough rates are significantly lower on content pages than on search pages - suggesting the targeting mechanism isn't as good as Google expected. Don't you think it might have something to do with the fact that people go to search pages looking for a particluar site or information? By displaying the ads on a content site they have to have people looking for more information on the subject who are willing to click on an advertisement. While matching the ads to the content is a good idea it would be better if they could find complementary products or information instead of having a site advertise its competetion.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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