Silicon Valley giant continues its improvement and growth in services
So far, in its short-yet-powerful history, Google has had two glaring gaps in its arsenal of services: social networks and a financial site. Both of these issues have been dealt with in the past week with the unveiling of two new services that Google will offer its users.
The finance section Google Inc. unveiled recently continues a philosophical shift that is turning its once-pure Internet search engine into an all-purpose Web site that seems increasingly interested in getting people to stick around instead of sending them elsewhere.
The evolution has been unfolding during the past four years as Google has introduced free e-mail, news, photo sharing, instant messaging, shopping and mapping services that are staples of one-stop Web sites commonly known as "portals."
Another addition to its numerous lists is Joga.com, which is a joint venture with Nike it has been working on for the past eight months. Joga will be a social network based on soccer. Google does have a social networking site already in Orkut, which has been a failure in every country not named Brazil.
"As we saw the social networks grow in the U.S. and elsewhere, we asked, ‘What if this was around sports, a specific sport?’" said Nike’s vice president for global brand management, Trevor Edwards, in regard to why they opted to launch a topic-specific community rather than a general one. Soccer was a logical choice, given the fact that it is the most popular sport outside the U.S.
The changes have sparked a debate about whether Google is moving wisely to counteract its biggest rivals – longtime Web portals like Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN – or overextending itself in a way that ultimately will diminish the appeal of its Internet-leading search engine.
"There have been concerns that Google is doing just about everything these days but focusing on search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a closely watched industry newsletter.
Although Google dislikes being described as a portal, Sullivan and industry analysts said its new finance section leaves little doubt where the company is headed.
They are being fairly careful about it, but they are walking very rapidly toward becoming a portal, said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "They have a lot of other services gunning for them, so they have become most keen about building user loyalty so the users do not have a reason to go someplace else."
Google Finance takes advantage of Google’s many resources to offer features that may help them trump other financial sites and garner the affections of investment-minded Web users.
Google Finance also has a convenient section for each company in regard to management details. Users just have to hover their mouse over an officer’s name and they will be able to read a short summary of what position he/she holds, their length of service in his/her position and his/her age. If they want more detail, they can simply click on links that lead them to a Reuter’s page with a detailed bio and compensation information or a Yahoo! Finance page that includes any of the officer’s recent trading activity.
By keeping visitors on its site longer, Google gets more chances to serve up the ads that account for virtually all of its profits, although for now, at least, Google does not plan to show ads on its finance section.
Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said the company remains committed to guiding its visitors to other Web sites with useful information. "Our motivation is not to provide sticky services," she said.
Finance emerged as one of Yahoo’s first specialty sections when the Sunnyvale-based company decided to diversify beyond Internet search and began packaging content on its own Web site.
Yahoo’s finance section, introduced a decade ago, has turned into one of the company’s most powerful traffic magnets. The 31.4 million people who came to Yahoo Finance last month spent an average of 54 minutes per visit on the site, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Unlike Yahoo, Google is not hiring any writers to produce articles for its finance section, which will provide links to stories by a variety of media. But Google’s site will include extensive analytical tools, including interactive charts, which seem likely to keep people on its site for longer periods.
When Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, they pledged to focus obsessively on Web search and avoid the temptation to diversify into other areas that might distract them.
The corporate philosophy section of Google’s Web site continues to declare: "It is best to do one thing really, really well."
But that same page now includes a footnote to reflect the company’s mind-set has changed during the past four years.
"Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat," Google once boasted.
Over time we have expanded our view of the range of services we can offer … and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio, Google said. This does not mean we have changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus “to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects.”
Google executives say the company devotes 70 percent of its time on Internet search, 20 percent on peripheral products like the finance section and e-mail and 10 percent on experiments like its recent proposal to build a high-speed Internet service in San Francisco.
Now that Google has launched a finance section, Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner believes the company is more likely to add financial planning and personal banking software to compete with Microsoft. Google’s Boralv said the company expects to add more features to the finance section, but said nothing is immediately planned.
Google’s expansion already has caused some people to draw cautionary comparisons to AltaVista, a pioneering Web search engine that set out to build a more diversified portal in the 1990s.
The expansion alienated AltaVista’s once-loyal users as its search results deteriorated, creating an opportunity for upstarts like Google. AltaVista eventually was sold and its technology now part of Yahoo’s effort to overtake Google in search.
You would not think it would be possible for Google to repeat the same mistakes as AltaVista, Sullivan said. "You would think Google would remember that one of the reasons it exists is because of the dumb things other people once did."
These new services will help Google to plug the small gaps and holes in its current offerings, and will give it the opportunity to obtain and keep new and unfamiliar users as it goes on searching the horizon for new objects.