Taking a Closer Look at How Google Works

With all the speculation about how much Yahoo is worth to Microsoft, or how much Yahoo would be worth if it outsourced its search-advertising platform to Google, it seems like a good opportunity to clarify how Google's system works. After all, it is Google's search and advertising empire that analysts believe to be the biggest threat to both Microsoft and Yahoo.

I wrote a story last week about some online marketers who thought a Microsoft-Yahoo combination would provide an alternative to Google. I've since spoken with a few folks at Google to get a better understanding of the mechanics behind its successful Web search and search-ad systems.

There are three ways for Web sites and companies to get online visibility through Google--Search, Adwords and Adsense--and each one works differently.

Its Search platform gave Google its early fame by making sense of the information on the Web. Once a search query is entered, Google's "spiders" crawl through all the information they can access on the Web and ranks the most relevant pages. The most meaningful factors involved in determining relevance are how many other sites link to a particular page and how many times the query terms appear on the page. Read More>>

Will The FTC Block Google’s Acquisition Of DoubleClick?

Scott Cleland, an analyst at the Washington, D.C. based telecom research group Prescursor has published a 35 page paper “Googleopoly: the Google-DoubleClick Anti-Competitive Case”. The paper argues that the US Federal Trade Commission will block Google’s $3.5 billion acquisition of DoubleClick on the basis that it will allow “Google to dominate online advertising and dramatically increase the opportunity for market collusion and price manipulation in the market for consumer click data, ad-performance tools, ad-brokering and ad-exchanges.”

Those interested can read the full report here. The stand out portion of Cleland’s report is how he describes Google dominance of the online advertising market post acquisition:

To equal Google-DoubleClick’s level of market concentration in the intermediary online advertising market, one single financial services company would have to own:

* The top 15 Wall Street banks/asset managers;
* ~60% of the hedge fund and private equity industries;
* The New York and London Stock Exchanges;
* The two leading providers of financial analytical tools: Bloomberg and Factset;
* Two of the three national providers of credit profiles: Experian and Equifax; and
* ~60% of the Federal Reserve’s and U.S. Census Bureau’s raw market and consumer data. More>>

Google's Postini Buy Threatens Microsoft

Google's July 9 acquisition of Postini is another clear sign that the search giant is staking a claim in the on-demand enterprise applications market and ratcheting up the heat in the already sizzling software as a service sector, especially against Microsoft.

With Postini, which began as an e-mail filtering company and evolved into compliance technology that enforces a company's communications policies, Google can now address the perception that its nascent portfolio of e-mail and messaging applications aren't quite ready for prime time. More>>

List of Google acquisitions in 2007

Date Company Name Category Amount January, 2007 Xunlei (partial acquisition) Network, file-sharing. undisclosed February, 2007 Adscape Video game advertising $23 million March, 2007 Trendalyzer Software undisclosed April, 2007 Tonic Systems Presentation software undisclosed April, 2007 Marratech video conferencing software Video conferencing undisclosed 5/11/2007 GreenBorder Technologies Desktop enterprise security undisclosed 6/1/2007 Panoramio Geospatial Photo-sharing Service undisclosed 6/3/2007 FeedBurner Online RSS Feeds $100 million 6/5/2007 PeakStream Parallel Processing undisclosed June, 2007 Zenter Presentations Software undisclosed 7/2/2007 GrandCentral VOIP Phone Aggregation $45 million 4/13/2007 DoubleClick Online Advertising $3.1 billion 7/9/2007 Postini Communications Security $625 million