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Google buys Pyra Labs
Posted by
chrisd
on Sun Feb 16, 2003 02:38 AM
from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.
from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.
Argyle writes "SiliconValley.com reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event."
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I think (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.
Mark another one up for Google being one of the best tech companies in the business world.
Re:I think (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, Google is a great search engine, but that doesn't mean that everything it touches turns to gold. It's not "the next big thing," nor is it a silly buzzword that you can bander around randomly.
Parent
Re:I think (Score:3, Interesting)
They did this for a reason. I can think of many cool things they could do with this. They, I'm pretty sure, can think up more.
I'm going to make a guess -- backed up, mind, by both their past performance and the general attitude that they exhibit -- that whatever they're up to -will be- the next big thing.
Or something that darn well could've -been- the next big thing and deserved to be explored.
Re:I think (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to make a guess... that this will be a horrible waste of money.
"Google good, four-legs baaad."
Re:I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on their past performance...
Google image search? Hoo yeah.
Maps, phonebooks, toolbar, search-term
spellchecker? Good ideas all, if not earthshattering, but it shows a consistent effort to improve the utility and relevance of their product.
Google News? Big pluses here.
Google Answers? Heh. Okay. But like I said, it deserved to be explored.
Google AdWords? They found -advertising- that -doesn't suck-. Yeesh. What does it take to impress you?
If your opinion differs, so be it, but I'm not sure you're basing it on -anything- other than reflexive avoidance of a perceived agenda.
Parent
Re:I think (Score:2)
What's the name? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's the name? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:I think (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet screaming monkeys would that be pointless. Blogs are like dreams; they're only interesting to the people they belong to. If by some freakish twist of fate I cared about your last trip to Reno or what kind of sandwich you ate last week, I'd ask you.
Parent
Ten years later... (Score:4, Insightful)
What? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ten years later... (Score:3, Insightful)
There might be some 'spit when they talk' types off in the corner spitting, but for the most part, I thought ./ loves google.
Re:Ten years later... (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM
CISCO
AMD
Intel (ok -they get some flack but they are not hated)
NVidia
The Slashdot crowd (for the most part) do not care how big a corporation is, but how good the service they provide. As long as Google remains just awesome, the slashdot crowd will kiss its solid gold ass.
Parent
Great :( (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great :( (Score:2)
There's a lowest common denominator problem here, and blogs are not really the only ones to blame...
Re:Great :( (Score:3, Insightful)
When Google bought out DejaNews (as the article point out), they made a section entitled Google Groups [google.com], separate from the main site.
You don't see newsgroup posts on your usual searches, do you?
Re:Great :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Moderators, this is NOT funny, it's insightful. There's nothing worse than doing a websearch for a serious topic and ending up with 50 hits, none of which are an informed source on the topic, and all of which are repeating some kind of rumor or random musing on the subject. Not to say that some blog-writers aren't informed, but the vast majority are not, and it's terribly frustrating to have to wade through countless pages of rambling and ranting to Get To The Point.
That said, i doubt Google will push blog hits in its results. A more likely result is a blog-specific search, or a way of networking together the resources that blogs link to. For example, Google's current algorithm seems to select sites based on "popularity" (number of links from other pages to that site)... blogs do this too, but in a social rather than statistical manner - certain "cool sites" become popular and blog-writers spam them around to other blog-writers and soon a whole bunch of blogs point to the same link - but only for a short time. Google might be able to lever this effect to produce date-ordered results related to a specific issue.
Re:Great :( (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't [google.com]?
I bet this'll be good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has never done anything that hasn't redefined what went before it.
Re:I bet this'll be good. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I bet this'll be good. (Score:3, Informative)
The Google Catapult (Score:5, Insightful)
Curiosities I have are how Google will deal with it's first for-pay service, and what, if any, value-adds Google will give to Blogger blogs: Higher rankings in search results? Possibly. Live posting into Google's search index? Probably. I'm sure there are ideas that haven't even been thought of yet.
I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.
Re:The Google Catapult (Score:2, Insightful)
http://answers.google.com/answers/main
Google's first pay service?
Re:The Google Catapult (Score:2)
The minute they did it with one thing, even if it were blog searches, it opens up a pandora's box of questions and opportunities: i.e. "Well, we need cash and we sold search results for GooBlogs, so why not for web searches??"
I think this is highly unlikely
Nothing so big (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing so big (Score:3, Interesting)
As of today, blogging population is quite small (considering the size of the general internet users). But what if blogging becomes one of common features that free directory service offers? Typical directory service today is just email and maybe address book you might get home page address, but that's it. No blogging (typically). What if blogging becomes widely available? AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and all these crap providers offer blogging? People want to express their thoughts and opinions. It's just that stuff like making web page was too damn hard for most people to express their thoughts and opinions and also it was difficult to communicate with others. Blogging is much easier. It has potential (I think).
just me or .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:just me or .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo is obviously the quintisential "portal site" and Google will never approach them in the level of functionality to the ordinary user.
Re:just me or .. (Score:2)
Google has been my homepage from the day I discovered it. If I need to see a weather report, I type in 'weather vancouver', and click 'I'm feeling lucky'. Chances are, I can do this as quickly as some of the more popular portal sites can load.
One feature that google could add would be something like /.'s 'slahboxes', a form where I could stick 10 or so links to be displayed on my google page.
Re:just me or .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yahoo, as an example of a portal site, uses Google as a web-searching tool. Frankly, I don't see why Google would want to move towards being a portal site, when that niche is already filled by a number of quality sites.
Parent
portal... (Score:2)
I hope this works out for the good. (Score:4, Interesting)
more even more people participating because of the
google tie-in. It would be very very nice if it got
so big that all kinds of news that our mostly
corporate influenced media didn't report on got out
and about and all around. I hope this turns into
one very huge good thing.
Pay for blogs (Score:3, Funny)
Think of the back-end info this gives them (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
--
Jordan
yes and...think data mining (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone thinking this is so google can be a better neighbor isn't paying attention.
Your blogs belong to google. Hand 'em over.
Parent
Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
Also, Google News works great, except it is sometimes slow to react to current events (Shuttle breakdown took a few hours to appear or so?). Blogs are known to be very fast information suppliers if a crisis is going on. Perhaps News can use the Blogs to spot something important quickly.
Parent
Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are going to be at google to look up other site, pictures, catalogs, etc. might as well get your daily blogging needs taken care of as well.
Uh-oh (Score:2)
So far: (Score:2)
I don't know what they will do with blogs though.
Tim
google...the *in thing* for CS folks (Score:2, Interesting)
i wanted to post anonymously but what the heck.
a related thing came up recently in our research group chitchat that google is actually sucking up quite a few of the top notch CS folks - rob pike anyone?:)
and it so happens that a couple of weeks back a bunch of lets say "highly talented" folks left the company i work for to google....:)
this acquisition seems to revalidate that they sure seem to be quite active and healthy and i am darn proud because the founders are our alumni......
Buying and selling the wisdom of the masses (Score:5, Interesting)
They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.
The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios [blogspot.com] or Dave Barry [blogspot.com], they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.
This kind of gets me back to an idea [dsl-only.net] I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.
Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal [livejournal.com]...
adeu,
Mateu
Why I am puzzled (Score:5, Insightful)
a. Google News
Dan Gillmor [siliconvalley.com], who broke this story, mentioned in an update the possibility, that the weblog links can be used to improve Google News.
But Google doesn't need to buy Pyra for that. Google can spider any leading weblog they want. Yes, there was this problem of interlinked weblogs resulting in a high PR (PageRank) for certain logs, but Google fixed that problem by giving more value to outgoing links then incoming links. They don't need to buy Blogger for indexing of weblogs.
b. Portal
Another suggestion that has been made: Google is moving to a portal.
I refuse to believe that Google is getting megalomanic. Besides, we all know what happened to AltaVista.
c. Direct access
Jshare suggested Google bought Blogger to get direct access to blog data.
But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?
d. Journal with ads
Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.
But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google [google.com] At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).
Whatever the reason is behind the buy, it will have a huge impact. The simple fact that one of the hottest internet companies buys Pyra's Blogger will make the product main stream in months.
Henk van Ess editor of Voelspriet [voelspriet.nl]
TIP: Check Ovidiu Predescu [webweavertech.com] site now and then. He started working at Google's on January 22 and writes about it in his ...weblog.
Re:Why I am puzzled (Score:3, Interesting)
But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?
Yes you could crawl the blogs easily enough, but the magic of blogs is the ability to instantly gauge the zeitgeist of the net. If you have to crawl them periodically to do that then you lose the time advantage.
Crawling constantly would overload the blog servers and make Google unpopular. This way they get access to the backend and can index and load links straight into the crawler as people post.
Trackbacks can be used to provide realtime ratings of a blogger's ranking within the community and thus ratings of the pages they link to. With blogs, Google can harness a huge distributed realtime relevancy filter.
Re:Why I am puzzled (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's when they update rather than how often that's exciting. When big events happen, people tend to comment on it immediately. Crawling once a day can't catch the moment.
But Google has a big relevancy filter, PageRanking.
But this is calculated on a very infrequent basis (comparatively). If I searched for Google and Pyra, I wouldn't find this announcement because it may not get crawled and page ranked for a month. Whereas people were commenting on it in blogs within minutes.
Your remarks make me think though. Google could use Pyra's Blogger for a dedicated search engine like Daypop, but with faster updates and perhaps better filters (although the PR in combination with keyword density and other factors does a good job). Those results can also be integrated in the normal engine.
But I'm wondering if they do this at once, or wait till Blogger has more then active 200.000 users. What do you think?
I think you can already see what I find most exciting about the combination of Google and Blogger
Time is a powerful dimension that traditional crawlers can only map in a very course-grained way. Via the back-end of a large blogging engine, you can watch memes move in realtime.
Parent
Switch the Strategy Around (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's likely google wants to improve blogger's services, and that may be the main game: if google's own resources can dramatically improve blogger, then a strong synergy exists after all.
What do people blog about? Recent events.
What is the world's best source of info on recent events? Google.
Google can integrate its data into the blogger UI to structure blogs, possibly link between them, etc. This in turn will improve google's own services. As you say, that part could be done by spiders. BUT by no means as effectively as a situation where the blog data itself is directly linked to google's records before it is is even published to the web.
Read what "Google Village" says (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I hope there isn't job cuts planned (Score:3, Informative)
I think at this point in time, if anyone could start an IPO gold rush in the internet world, it's google.
Re:Great! (Score:2)
2)Spend $101M/yr for 2 yrs.
3)???
4)Profit!
How stupid do you think people are?
Re:Helping with the death of weblogging. (Score:3, Insightful)
So why do it in the first place? The whole point of publishing something online is in the hope that someone out there will read it (for whatever reason). If it truely was "just for yourself" you would be writing it in a pen-and-paper journal, or in a personal document you never uploaded. Of course blog-writers want people to read their stuff. Unfortunately most of it is garbage.
There is no irony in the grand-parent's comment because it's a comment in a community. When blogs became popular people started calling Slashdot a "web log", but really it's always been a discussion forum, just like usenet but on the web. Blogs on the other hand are about a single person making some commentary about this subject or that. It's about the ego of the poster, whereas Slashdot and similar discussion sites are about the combined thoughts of all of the posters.