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Who will Google buy next ?

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

Friday, August 4, 2006
17 years ago10,521 views

Google's strategy seems quite unclear.

Will Google pull off another Writely style acquisition and complete the Google Office or go after something like Digg or Reddit for a Web 2.0 experience ?

Any ideas anyone.

NateDawg [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Stupid answer, but probably both. The Google office makes sense and is apparent with the writely and spreadsheet apps. As for the Web 2.0, absolutely ;-)

TD [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

There is no need for them to take Digg. They might however bring Digg like features into Google News, but I doubt it will work well.

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Google acquire one to two companies every week. Small companies that people never heard of.

Writer Shore [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Haochi, how do you know that? I'd love to get a look at the source you get that from, I think it would be fascinating.

As far as Google acquiring a Web 2.0 Digg or Reddit, I feel like that would be the sort of thing Google would want to create on its own because I think they could learn a lot from that. Perhaps Google Co-op was their effort in that realm.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Ya Google Co-op works quite well. However it complements Google's Search. It's an addition kind of like Suggest not a whole new product.

But Co-op is definitely moving in that social realm so yea.

Haochi Really ?

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Reporter: How many acquisitions do you do?
Schmidt: “It’s one or two a week it seems. Most acquisitions: They are very small. 1-2-3 people and you never, never hear about them.”

Reuters: http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/07/14/google-ceo-takes-questions-from-press-at-sun-valley

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

That's a real shame. If only we knew, we could really know what Google's upto.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I think they're more "tough solutions" than community oriented. If someone solves a single, modular complex problem really well – say, recognizing an object within an image – they wanna buy the small team of developers even if their tool has no community yet. Digg is great in terms of having a huge community, but doesn't seem to solve any particular complex problem (I'm sure their "what makes it to the frontpage" algos are kinda complex by now, but it's not really the hardest problem in the world for good engineers).

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

<< Who will Google buy next ? >>

maybe this blog.. :P

just kidding :)

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

yeah david, we tried that here already :)-

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/42480.html#id42480

Seriously, Google will not buy out anything for the time being --till next year

1) They have invested in capex [new google comples – portland]
2) Cluster server farming and harversting changes [dc rollouts]
3) Dmarc / Adsense / Adwords etc etc are still their main revenue stream
4) checkout has not gained traction [ IMHO, value props failure]

if I were CFO, iI would not authorize any capex for aqqusitions.. I would only have increase spend on current operations costs and make services more seamless...

Yu [PersonRank 4]

17 years ago #

Riya! If they can. I think they were already courted by Google once. They just rolled out the beginning of what is the 2nd revision of their site. I wonder what Google is doing on the image recognition research. Tough problem. Would be cool if they committed some long term resources to it.

Pete [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Wikipedia. Google search results are often flooded with the same Wikipedia entries anyway.

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Yu: nice idea. Since /pd pointed us to Riya! I've become quite addicted to it, but the base is too small for the moment to be a lot more than just an experiment...

Richard Eid [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Thumbstacks.

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

>Thumbstacks.
My guess is, Google won't buy Thumbstack. They will develop one on their own.

Travis Harris [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I'm guessing that a HUGE % of the digg crowd is also Google. So their acquisition would not gain overall users, just get a popularity boost for a service that they could easily replicate. Digg is not complex, it is just a good idea.
As for adding to their office suite, it is something they definitely could use. But they will need to add come cohesiveness to it. Right now they all look, act, feel and smell different. With different login procedures and everything.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I doubt they'll buy Thumbstack, it's too obvious.

But then again Writely was bought, and Spreadsheets was developed from acquired technology. So I dunno. We'll See.

Travis is right about the Digg part.

Elias KAI [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Will they buy me ? you ?

XYZ [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Any chance of Google acquiring www.zoho.com!!

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

[put at-character here]XYZ, I doubt it. Google already has a Word Processing and Spreadsheet Application etc. So they'll probably acquire a solo app or develop one in house. Or maybe like Haochi pointed out, they've already made an acquisition. I remember reading that Spreadsheets was developed using acquired technology.

Yu [PersonRank 4]

17 years ago #

What do you know.

Moving to more challenging computational and algorithmic research projects, Norvig discussed work being done on image processing in an attempt at "face localization" to determine from group photos, where a photo was taken. Identification of people on the web can't be done so easily. The best they've reliably achieved is to determine if a face is that of a male or a female.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060809SESGoogleYahooMSNResearchLaboratories.html

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Yep, that's why I've been speculating Riya.

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