Google report card

Posted on | February 21, 2007 |

If you want to read the Google report card go here

Getting an understanding may be more difficult. The big take away is that:

“Since January 2006 Google Web Search sessions have grown 23%. If you aggregate all of Google search sessions across all of their properties you get a year-over-year growth rate of 24%. This means that all non-Web search properties contributed only 1ppt to Google’s overall gains.”

Google contiues to grow. That is not to say that every part of the giant is growing or even the ones that are growing are going at the same lightening speed. I for one think this is a good thing.

I like that fact that not all the cylinders are firing together or at top speed. In order for a company to sustain growth you need to TRY things - some will fail and some will succeed. It is extremely important that the company in the tech lead (some may question this) be out trying all kinds of things.

One thing that may be hidden is that Google merged local search into maps- while it looks as though local slowed considerably the maps took off. I believe a very careful eye needs to be paid to local search over the next year. The greatest jumps will occur here and we all know why - there is tremendous revenue potential for the one who gets local RIGHT.

Part of the issue I believe is the users of the Internet have not yet decided on how they will search locally yet. Will they go to a local directory and go from there or will we put in the geographic designation as part of the search criteria. While there are plenty of opinions on this and much money is being bet I don’t hink we know just yet on how this will go.

There is plenty of arguement for the local search direcotries - after all isn’t it easier to keep the local directories more current than the Internet as a whole. If that were true then the people doing your local yellow pages would have this all figured out and well on their way to making the big bucks promised at the end. After having worked in the yellow page industry and using the local yellow page search function I can tell you they have a LONG way to go before they will be the choice of many.

I think the question remains in that the reason for a local search, I contend, is different than why one would use the Internet to search more broadly for say a company that makes bellows. When searching locally I may want to find the closest provider of a service but I may also just want the address, the hours of operation, the one who will service my Maytag washer, etc.

The local search options I have seen so far do not do a god job of getting me what I want yet and with too much of the things that I do not need. I would not bet against Google in figuring it out just yet but I would love to see a bit more creativity in this realm. So far the searches are driven by the advertisers and not by the buyers. Let me remind those in charge of the search engines - while the advertising revenue is important - the advertisers are not in charge - find a better way to show the advertisers than making me scroll down a page of ads before I start to get what I want like

This is a good example of what is happening and what I believe will be a failure - hey you local search guys - try a different approach.