Google pulls the plug on more products – the Larry Page clean-up continues
It’s no secret that the new, Larry Page-led Google is pruning its sprawling collection of products.
Page said so himself on the company’s quarterly earnings conference call, and the recent closures of Slide (a social networking firm Google acquired for $179 million a year ago), Google Labs and Google Health, have made it clear that Page is a man of his word.
Ten more Google products were put on the chopping block on Friday — or as Google put it more delicately in a post on its official blog, the products were swept up in a “spring-clean.”
“Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features,” said Google Senior Vice President Alan Eustace in the blog post.
Among the latest casualties: Aardvark, a pioneering social question-and-answer service that had earned praise from tech pundits before Google acquired it in 2010; Fast Flip, a two-year-old tool that allows readers to quickly “flip” through pages of digital newspapers and magazines, and Sidewiki a tool that lets people leave comments about specific Web pages as they browse.
Eustace noted that all the Google employees working on these projects will be moved over to “higher-impact products.”
“We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change,” he said. “We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience.”
Forget about Google Me, Facebook unveils its Google rival
For weeks, techies have speculated about Google Me, the company’s secret project to take on social networking king Facebook.
But Google isn’t the only one that can play that game.
On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a new question-and-answer service for the 500 million users of its Internet social network that could have serious implications for Google.
The new service isn’t a traditional search engine, per se, but it addresses many of the same needs that a search engine does, and thus could pose a threat to Google’s lucrative search empire.
Facebook Questions, as the new service is called, allows any Facebook user to tap into the collective knowledge of the vast Facebook community for recommendations about restaurants and music, gardening tips, or whatever else tickles their fancy.
Facebook said on Wednesday that the service is currently being “beta” tested with a limited number of people, but that it hopes to make it widely available as quickly as it can. All answers to queries will be publicly visible to everyone on Facebook and classified according to topics or themes for easy browsing by Facebook users.
Google boss Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin have stressed that Facebook is not a threat to Google, noting that web surfers conduct significantly more searches on Google when they become Facebook users.
Publishing the questions to a wall for everyone to see smacks of privacy issues.
Inside Google’s M&A machine: 3 months, $145 million, 9 deals
It’s no secret that Google has been on a buying binge, snapping up tech start-ups at a rapid-fire pace. What’s less transparent is how much that spree is costing it.
How much money is forked over is mostly a matter for speculation. Google doesn’t disclose financial terms for most acquisitions and only a few of the deals have had financial details leak out onto the blogosophere.
So it’s a bit of a welcome surprise that Google shed a little more light on the matter on Wednesday in a regulatory filing with the SEC, in which it said it paid a total cash consideration of $145 million for nine acquisitions in the first three months of the year.
That works out to roughly $16.11 million per deal on average, though some deals, of course, fetched higher prices (social search site Aardvark was reportedly acquired for $50 million), and some deals may have involved stock as well as cash.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said publicly that the search giant expects to acquire about one company a month now that it has emerged from the worst of the economic downturn. At its current pace, Google is exceeding that goal by a wide margin.
If you include the $123 million deal to buy On2 Technologies ($28 million in cash, $95 million stock), which closed in February, Google spent at least $268 million on M&A in the first quarter.
Google is known to acquire companies for the engineering talent as much as anything else. According to Wednesday’s filing, Google cited goodwill as accounting for $107 million of the $145 million in cash that it paid for the nine acquisitions.
Aardvark’s Internet search: No web pages required
Microsoft may be the only company with the wherewithal to challenge Google’s Internet search dominance head on, but a number of firms are trying to outflank Google with services that handle aspects of search not covered by Google’s index of Web pages.
Aardvark – a firm whose cofounders include two ex-Googlers – is pushing something it calls “social search.”
Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark’s service taps a person’s network of social contacts. Ask Aardvark for anything from restaurant recommendations to home improvement tips, and the service will relay the question to Facebook and Twitter friends who have identified themselves as “experts” on various topics.
The service, which has earned praise from the New York Times’ David Pogue and other tech bloggers, was launched as a beta version earlier this year but accessing Aardvark required using instant messaging software or an iPhone app.
On Wednesday, the company put the search box directly on a website – vark.com – making its social search service more accessible to a larger pool of people.
Like the so-called real time search engines popularized by Twitter, Collecta and OneRiot, Aardvark represents a still small, but potentially dangerous trend for Google: Much of the content that flows through these new types of search services is not necessarily accessible by Google’s search engine.
