Google - Where To Next?

By Martin Murray

CEO, Interactive Return

Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and to use its substantial advertising revenues to achieve this goal. Therefore, the race is on to find more and more channels for its advertisements. This month, Google has signed off deals with eBay and social networking site MySpace to publish Google’s Adwords on both of these sites. The MySpace deal gives Google access to 100 million users many of whom are not accessible via any other medium. Google has plans to embed video advertisements in the video content that users are downloading from Google Video. The company has been placing advertisements in printed media for some time and in the US you can now hear Google generated ads on radio. What’s next?

Schmidt proposed that standardisation of the processes and interfaces for setting up and managing sponsored listings across all search engines would be beneficial for everyone in the industry but was unable to give specifics about where this might happen next.

In what would be a significant improvement for advertisers, it was stated that the facililty to target within Google’s Adsense network would be introduced. This could allow advertisers to select the websites where their ads will appear.

In a dramatic twist, news of AOL’s release of search data and the possibility of identifying individual users from that data went public in the New York Times, the same morning that Schmidt spoke to the conference. He assured the audience that Google takes very seriously the matter of user’s privacy but then added “never say never” in regard to the possibility of something similar happening at Google.

A number of authors and publishers at Search Engine Strategies San Jose expressed concern about Google’s policy of publishing copyrighted material without any system in place for remunerating the publisher. Schmidt made it clear that Google’s legal advice was that this constituted a “fair use” of the content and Google would continue to make copyrighted material available to searchers.

Since the conference, figures released by comScore show that Google has lost 1% of its share of the search market but we suspect that Google isn’t ready to throw in the towel yet.