For the month of January, 2006, there were several interesting developments.
Google Buys Stake in AOL
Google exchanged $1 billion plus $300 million in advertising credit for a 5 percent stake in AOL. The guys from the Googleplex beat out several other buyers, including Microsoft, to close this highly competitive deal. The value from Google's perspective is that it ensures that AOL will continue to serve up Google's search results and that one of the most popular Internet destinations will remain a Google advertising partner. Google will also be given new opportunities to advertise to AOL's huge membership base. Google and AOL will integrate their content where it makes sense, such as for products like Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger. AOL will also give the Google spiders access to additional content. To get this deal done, Google may have had to compromise its principle of a clean, graphics-free interface; there are rumors that AOL will be given the ability to place graphical ads on Google's web properties. Time will tell if this investment will be worth the sacrifices that Google has made.
Yahoo! Buys Del.icio.us
Don't let the name fool you-Del.icio.us has nothing to do with food. It is a social bookmarking site in which Yahoo! saw $40 million worth of potential. The site works by letting its users "tag" websites; the websites are then displayed under the appropriate tag names rather than under their proper names. There are no set rules on tags, but, generally, the more specific the description, the more helpful the tag is. There have been previous discussions about search engines using this type of data in their ranking algorithms, but the potential for manipulation is very high. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! utilizes this investment.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! is betting that you would rather ask your peers a question for free than pay some so-called experts or a snooty butler (just kidding, Jeeves). Yahoo! Answers is a service similar to Google Answers, but with one big difference. The Google service has registered experts that field your questions for a fee, whereas the Yahoo! version lets anybody put his or her two cents in for free. This makes for some potentially humorous, sometimes worthless answers, but, after all, it is a free service.
Ask Jeeves Adds Page Translations
Apparently, Jeeves has been busy learning several new languages. Perhaps the threat of being fired has really motivated him. Ask Jeeves has recently added language translation functionality to its web listings. The rationale behind the implementation is that the engine has started to index foreign language pages. As the site is including these pages in its search results, it wanted to offer its users the ability to read them. This is a positive sign that Ask Jeeves is committed to keeping up with its bigger, more popular search engine counterparts.