Google is synonymous with search marketing, with almost all of its $10 billion plus revenues coming from that domain. And it has fine tuned the art of searching for anything from the arcane to the most mundane in a fraction of a second. But with stock market expectations not abating, how would Google leverage its search expertise to keep ahead?With its AdWords algorithms, Google plays a central role in serving up relevant ads for any queries users throw at it. This has been further enhanced with other services like mail and image search which is an additional opportunity for Google to place ads relevant to the key words our in our Gmail inbox. All of which is not new. What could take this way further is the gPhone – rumours of which are flying fast and thick.
According to a recent Piper Jaffray study on the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, search is the second most commonly used application on the Internet (after mail). More importantly, it is expected to grow almost three times the current size, to about $45 billion by 2011. And two of the key trends are going to be an explosion of new technologies in the search area and increasing “local search” opportunities. Imagine how potent Google’s search technology will be on a mobile platform and how it can exponentially increase the pool of local advertisers.
One of the key reasons for Google’s success as an advertising platform actually comes from thousands of scattered, small businesses peddling everything from timeshare to VHS cassettes of Citizen Kane played backwards (don’t ask me – somebody seems to want it). Most of these businesses find it far more efficient to advertise specific offers to a tightly defined base online (people who like watching movies backwards?!), rather than spend millions of bucks advertising on newspapers and television. In that sense, Google has actually opened up a new, hitherto fragmented market. Now imagine how much more widespread that that can be if the service can be migrated to a mobile platform. How many more local businesses will make use of advertising that is targeted at a tightly defined user base – either geographically (Lamington Road, Mumbai) or by mobile usage. And if that gPhone is priced at around $100 (as the rumour mills suggest), the Piper Jaffray numbers will suddenly start looking very small indeed.
2 comments:
Let me point you to a wonderful post by Seth Godin-
The haystack
It's easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.
The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.
But they're terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can't help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can't help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can't help me rank the service of four accounting firms.
There's a giant opportunity. (Many opportunities, actually). It's to collate and slice and dice and rank domain-specific knowledge and surface it. There are some areas where this is done extremely well (restaurants, for example), but in most cases, it's not done at all.
Organizing the world's information is a laudable goal. But we're only an inch down the road.
Absolutely. I wonder if that's because making connections require human intervention. Though knowing how fast things are changing, I don't think it'll take very long for algorithms to replace such interventions as well.
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