Monday, March 21, 2005
buying, selling, and booking
There has been a flurry of activity over the past couple of days as the leading search services change hands, purchase other products, and deploy new functionality.
First on the list is the purchase of Ask Jeeves by InterActive Corp (owners of expedia and match.com among other things) for nearly $2 Billion. This could be fairly significant as they add the Ask.com search box to all the InterActive properties.
Second is the purchase of the photo sharing site Flickr by Yahoo. This probably had no real marketing impact, but shows Yahoo's willingness to hold onto their portal audience at all costs. See the post on the Yahoo Search blog.
Third is the full deployment of Google Print. Now if you search for things like Sherlock Holmes or Much Ado About Nothing (include the word "book" in your search) you will have access to the full text of the books. All books are scanned so you have to page through them, but it is still pretty cool. In does raise the question though, is anything safe from Google?
First on the list is the purchase of Ask Jeeves by InterActive Corp (owners of expedia and match.com among other things) for nearly $2 Billion. This could be fairly significant as they add the Ask.com search box to all the InterActive properties.
Second is the purchase of the photo sharing site Flickr by Yahoo. This probably had no real marketing impact, but shows Yahoo's willingness to hold onto their portal audience at all costs. See the post on the Yahoo Search blog.
Third is the full deployment of Google Print. Now if you search for things like Sherlock Holmes or Much Ado About Nothing (include the word "book" in your search) you will have access to the full text of the books. All books are scanned so you have to page through them, but it is still pretty cool. In does raise the question though, is anything safe from Google?
