Buzz Kill: What Would Google Do? DON’T ASK!
LABOR DAY NEWS FLASH: “What would Google do?” is no longer the buzz question du jour, thanks to Google itself: Google shift on handling of news.
Tim Web 2.0 O’Reilly has asked it, Jeff Jarvis has lived it: WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO?, aka WWGD.
No need to ask, I have repeatedly responded, because it is crystal clear what Google always does: What is good for the Googleplex and its shareholders, AS IT SHOULD.
The blogosphere, however, wanted to believe in Google, not the ruthless $160 billion market cap would be Microsoft killer corporate behemoth it actually is, of course, but a (imaginary) touchy feely, Stanford student, advertising is NOT evil hack.
Google has never made a secret of its world domination ambitions: the cloud, the U.S. presidential elections, U.S. healthcare, “all books in all languages,” every single Internet, radio, TV, newspaper, mobile ad…Nevertheless, the tech elite STILL thanks their lucky Web stars for Google!
For example, Dave Winer admonished Jason Calacanis for daring to analyze Google SERPs, authoring an apology to Google on Calacanis’ behalf:
To our friends at Google, I’d like to apologize for saying that your search engine is filled with spam.
Winer is in the Google camp, not a Mahalo one, because he believes:
Their proposition to Web writers and podcasters is basically fair, it’s a win-win. We get flow from them, they get ad revenue. The also offer us a way to put ads in our site so we can profit financially from the relationship. Nothing in Jason’s pitch offers us anyhting like that. No flow, no money.
YAY? Truth, justice and the GOOGLE way? Not quite.
The vaunted Google “flow” is undeniably flowing away, step by incremental Google step: Universal Search, Google News…WHAT’S MORE, it was never the Google link love fest the blogosphere delights in making it out to be, as I analyze in Scott Karp vs. Techmeme? News Aggregation Rules:
Google shrewdly barters search engine links for free access to the content of others to garner its hefty profit margins. Google, though, is the only guaranteed winner in its link barter based business model. Google dangles promises of bountiful search traffic eagerly clicking on news “headlines” and book “snippets.” Google’s promises of link love, however, are merely ephemeral IOUs, without any tangible, guaranteed return on copyright exploitation.
What is certain, however, is that Google gains no-cost access to content, which it can sell ads against. The Google revolution is not that it is “organizing the worlds’ information” or that it is providing “targeted, measurable advertising.”
The true Google revolution is that it has succeeded in portraying itself as a magnanimous business “partner” that is happiest when it showers the Web world with Google link love.
Jeff Jarvis has unequivocally stated that: “Yes, Google is the new God.” Even HIS faith appears a bit shaken, however, in light of Google’s latest News moves:
I keep saying that the industry is not assessing the real threat of Google: It’s advertising. Google is taking over the market for targeted — and next, local — advertising and we are letting them. That is the threat.
In other Buzz Machine words, time to start asking a new blogosphere question, as what “Google would do” is not always good for us.
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