FTC Still Examining GoogleMob—Wants Feedback from Rivals
Now here’s a great way to gather totally, completely unbiased information about a potential merger: ask the companies’ competitors. Okay, so the FTC isn’t completely crazy—of course other companies in the market would have a pretty good idea what the industry looks like and what a big merger might do. But still, we can only hope the FTC will remember to take their opinions with a grain of competitive salt.
AdMob, the popular mobile advertising company, and Google, the wanna-be-popular mobile advertising company, announced the deal in November. Google gave AdMob $750M in stock in the deal. The next month, consumer groups began lobbying against the deal. Now the FTC wants both advertisers and rivals to make sworn statements about the pending merger.
The probe isn’t public, but sources say the commission is “investigating whether Google’s proposed purchase of AdMob would reduce competition in the market for Internet advertising on mobile phones.” (Kind of a duh.) Google says it’s continuing to talk with the FTC and cooperate with requests for information.
Bloomberg consulted Thomas Ensign, an antitrust lawyer, on the matter. He said, “It’s difficult to envision a scenario where this development, if true, is positive for Google-AdMob, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is going to challenge the deal.”
Just over a year ago, the US Department of Justice was hours from filing anti-trust charges against the search giant over another major advertising deal (with Yahoo). Is Google pushing their luck with this merger? Will GoogleMob hurt the mobile ad industry? Will the FTC stop the deal?
Google Hangs Out a Shingle for Its Apps Marketplace
Google does what Google does and it has now opened the doors on an apps marketplace that is designed for Google Apps customers. Don’t think the overlap in terminology with the other app guys is coincidence either. The difference with this form of app though is the fundamental difference that separates Google from Apple. Google provides apps that are fundamental business needs and this strategy is where the search giant appears to be hanging its hat moving forward relating to search, advertising and more.
Yesterday the Official Google blog reported:
Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.
We’ve found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We’re often asked when we’ll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can’t and won’t do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.
First of all, having 2 million businesses using Google Apps is pretty impressive. While most are the SMB’s of the world, Google has shown the world the ability to penetrate enterprise accounts as well. Of course, this hits at another of the biggest competitors against the Goog: Microsoft.
Some apps that are part of the roll out are Intuit Online payroll, Manymoon project management, PS Connect and JIRA Studio for development to manage flow between various apps.
Watching this strategy unfold is pretty interesting. There is an awful lot riding on it and it would appear that Google has more of the pieces under their roof than any other competitor does. How this plays out should be fascinating. One of the final paragraphs of the post tells the real story:
For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.
Notice the order of how these are written. What it seems to be saying is that Google wants the enterprise and is daring everyone else to find a way to stop them.
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Eye-tracking Proves Real-Time Search Not Useful
OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter).
The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and information foragers. It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on.
Information foragers took slightly longer to turn to the real-time results: 7.39 seconds. It was the thirteen area their eyes focused on—but the first 12 areas were all just above the real-time results in the news results. (The search task here was to research a selected current news item using the search engine of choice—for 89% of all participants, that was Google.) (Side note: I’m not sure why the times in the above graph are so much higher than the numbers OneUpWeb also provided that I used in these paragraphs.)
The second search task was segmented by group—the consumers were to look for a product they were considering to buy for themselves or for someone else as a gift. Information foragers were to again look for information on a current news topic. Interestingly, in this second set, consumers were five seconds faster than information foragers to focus on real-time results.
Meanwhile, 20% of consumers and 30% of information foragers actually clicked on real-time results, as opposed to 69% of consumers and 60% of information foragers that clicked on the top 5 results excluding real-time.
I’ve long argued that real-time results will only be helpful for a very small, select set of data—and for that set, most people would know to go to Twitter or Facebook in the first place anyway. I’m not the only one. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur points to several others who feel the same way, most notably Nick Carr, who sardonically chronicles the efforts to organize the web’s information around 140-character ephemera.
And yet Google insists that this information is useful and must be foisted upon the user. Aruther quotes Marissa Mayer last summer:
We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those types of patterns emerge, so there’s a lot of useful information about real-time interactions that we think ultimately will really affect search.
Apparently users don’t quite agree yet.
What do you think? Are real-time results useful?
Toyota Turns to Twitter for ORM Issues
Toyota is now turning to Twitter to help stem the tide of negativity that has been heaped upon it during the “Recall Free For All” (that one’s mine). I guess someone at Toyota HQ has been studying up on this Twitter thing and decided that it was the way to go. Of course, just going headlong into a potentially hostile environment would be foolish so they have found a way to “manage” just what is being seen and heard in this attempt to make things better again with the top selling automaker in the world.
TechCrunch reports
The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.
Called Toyota Conversations the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota.
Risky business for sure unless, of course, you can somehow “manage” just what is shown in the tweets that are part of this effort.
You may notice after taking a look at all of the top stories that are being aggregated on the site, that most of the news is positive. That doesn’t seem to match the general tone of the media writing about Toyota, which has been quick to criticize the car company for its manufacturing mistakes. If you take a look at Twitter sentiment app Tweetfeel, the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Toyota lean more negative. Tweetmeme channels can be set up to pick up only certain news sources. It looks like Toyota picked the friendlier ones.
Well, when I took a look this morning at the Toyota Conversations Tweetmeme site they may have not caught everything.
Take note of the logo used in Toyota’s tweets as well. It makes the company look like some kind of evil empire. Using black as your primary color to help people warm up to you again is not very effective but hey, what do I know?
So will this effort by Toyota help the cause? Jeremiah Owyang is quoted in the LA Times blog about this very subject as saying
“In the social sphere, it’s often best to be proactive during a crisis, to let the market know you’re listening, and centralize the discussion around your brand, giving the brand more opportunity to guide the conversation,” Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang said. “Yet don’t be fooled, on the social sphere the illusion of power is quickly dispelled, as everyone can have a say.”
Is this the right time for Toyota to do this? Wouldn’t it have been more genuine if this was underway from the very start because now it appears to be a contrived effort to stop the flow of negative press rather than a sincere attempt to “make nice” with a buying public that may not ever trust this brand like it used to.
Google Helps You Find Things Nearby
Google recently made search improvements as your roam around by adding the My Location option to mobile search. The idea is to help everyone find things that can be visited, used or accessed right then and there based on your location. While there is plenty of concentration on the mobile side of search they have not let the local aspect of search from the desktop get stale either.
Last year Google started to give Google map results even if there was no local qualifier in the search which moved local search to the next level. The latest enhancement allows you to look for things that are nearby but with a slightly different twist.
Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing webpages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.” Check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”
This can come in handy in planning trips or a variety of ways. By creating more options on the geography that are not anchored to specific keywords this certainly adds more power to the local search capabilities of the search giant.
Here’s my question though. How many people does Google think will adopt this option? Most users of search are so unsophisticated that they will have no clue that this option exists. How many times have you seen someone type in a full URL into a Google search rather than into the browser?
I suppose these things are good to have as more people get educated regarding search but most people just type in their basic needs and either refine from there or get frustrated and move on. If I were Google I would work to educate the true masses about what they can actually do with Google. Right now I think that they feel that by telling the “industry” that it’s enough. Trouble is it’s not. If the ‘regular’ searcher doesn’t even know these things exist is Google missing the full value of these offerings? Just a thought.
Is Facebook Becoming More Important Than Google?
That intentionally “inflammatory” headline is inspired by an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, “Facebook directs more online users than Google.” The article cites Compete data and says, “Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the [...]
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The Sky Is Falling! (And So Is Google’s Market Share)
Neilsen has reported their search market share numbers for January—and Google seems to have forgotten which way is up. While the search giant is still #1 and in no danger, they lost a percentage point of the search query market from December, falling from 67.3% to 66.3% of all queries.
If Google’s, losing, who’s gaining? Just about everyone else, actually. The other major search engines either held steady or gained slightly—Yahoo was up 0.1 percentage points (to 14.5%), Bing gained 1 percentage point (to 10.9%) and nearly all the smaller search engines in the top ten increased their share month over month.
The overall search query market increased by over 300 million searches. About a third of those queries were run through Google. Yahoo saw over 50 million more queries in January, while Bing fielded 130 million more queries than it did in December.
Is this a significant trend? Of course not. Most likely, other search engine monitoring services won’t see the same change. And it doesn’t seem like a percentage point is going to hurt Google much in the long run, since their overall number of search queries is still growing anyway.
Or maybe Google bought that Super Bowl ad just in time.
What do you think?
Google Toolbar Spying on Whitehouse.gov (and others)?
Now he’s an interesting discovery by Ben Edelman: disabling the Google Toolbar doesn’t actually prevent it from sending data back to Big Brother Google.
He ran some tests, with the Google Toolbar disabled and closed from view, and sure enough, the toolbar still transmitted URL information back to the search giant.
In his example, Edelman throws a little spice on his privacy concerns by visiting www.Whitehouse.gov to demonstrate the covert signal:
He notes that this only happens if you have the “Enhanced Features”–such as PageRank and Sidewiki–enabled, but he also points out just how hard it is to disable these features (you have to reinstall Google Toolbar).
Now, here’s the thing. If you’re an seo of any kind, you probably already had a gut-feeling that simply not displaying the toolbar wasn’t really a way to stop Google from getting its grubby hands on your surfing habits–right? So consider this confirmation for most of us and a warning to anyone that had no idea.
So, what should Google do? Edelman suggests the following:
Google’s first step is simple: Fix the Toolbar so that X and Manage Add-Ons in fact do what they promise. When a user disables Google Toolbar, all Enhanced Features transmissions need to stop, immediately and without exception. This change must be deployed to all Google Toolbar users straightaway.
Will Google volunteer such a change, or will it take some European court to force its hand?
German Govt. Says Google Becoming ‘Giant Monopoly’
Germany’s justice minister has shot a bow at Google, saying that the company is becoming a “giant monopoly” and threatening government action if it doesn’t become more transparent.
According to a Reuters report over the weekend, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger shared her concerns about products like Google Earth and Google Books with the German magazine Der Spiegel:
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Consumer Groups Lobby FTC to Block GoogleMob
Early last month, Google announced it was acquiring AdMob for $750M. The deal is still in the works, of course—in part, at least, because the FTC is taking a first and, as of last week, second look at the deal. As the FTC continues to scrutinize the search giant buying the mobile ad giant, consumer groups are taking their opportunity to have their say—and it’s not in favor of the deal.
The biggest concerns of the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog include decreasing competition in the mobile ad market and consumer privacy. The groups say that together, Google and AdMob would control most of the mobile ad market. AdMob is already the leader in the market, thought there’s lots of competition in that area. However, with backing from the search engine, it’s possible that AdMob could come to dominate their arena just as Google pwns theirs.
The second argument is based on the fact that Google and AdMob both collect considerable information about their users. Together, that information may be a threat to consumers’ privacy, with the two entities sharing everything from searching habits to location data. The groups’ full filing with the FTC is embedded below.
It’s easy to understand the appeal for Google, though—with AdMob “approaching a $100M business in the next three years,” as TC puts it, this could be the way for Google to stake their claim in the emerging mobile market.
CW and the CDD often make this type of filing on Google’s acquisitions, and it doesn’t always seem to have an effect. But with the FTC already taking a harder look, their word may have that much more sway with the regulators this time around.
What do you think? How much influence will CW & the CDD have this time? Will the FTC ultimately okay the deal?
