Google buys Pyra Labs

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."

I think

This has the potential to be huge... Google Blogs..

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

As though you couldn't already search within a particular domain using Google.

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.

Re:I think

If you don't have any idea what they're going to be doing with it, what business do you have reproaching it?

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? ... based on that, they're up to something that bears close attention. I can't speak to the -profitability- of it, but they're still here, at least.

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.

What's the name?

Bloogle? Gooblogs?

Re:What's the name?

well, theres already froogle [google.com] :)

Re:I think

Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.

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.

Ten years later...

On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.

Re:Ten years later...

On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.

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.

Great :(

So as if my searches weren't already becoming diluted with Blog drivel they definitely will now!

I bet this'll be good.

Expect some brilliantly designed, 'best practice' implementaion to appear on google in a few months.

Google has never done anything that hasn't redefined what went before it.

The Google Catapult

I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan [evhead.com]'s mentality. Google Labs [google.com] is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.

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.

Nothing so big

It is not a big news actually, as people wanted it to be. Searching and Blogging are different things. Webblogging will reach its limits soon, since not everyone is eager to put something out there. It is a personal choice, and blogging, although still with growth potential, will not become the next big thing. Google's decision is in some way a very good decision, since we need a tool to search blogs, separately, just like Google News. Google is right again on the issue. Blogging will be important.

just me or ..

Is it just me or does it seem that Google is trying to become the number 1 information portal?

Re:just me or ..

No, you're missing my point entirely. Google is not just starting out, and Google is not "another upstart portal wannabe."

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.

I hope this works out for the good.

It would be nice if the overall impact of this is
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

Internet connection ......... $30.00 Getting a blog .............. $10.00 Highest Google rating ....... $250.00 The whole word seeing my daily rants about how my life sucks and how the world is out to get me ...................... Priceless

I hope there isn't job cuts planned

I know that sometimes a buyout or merger is just a nice way to cover up the layoffs to the investors.

Investor "Oh why did you scale back? I thought you said we needed all these workers to make product!"

CEO "Nevermind those bums, we just aquired another company and all their intellectual property! Because of the merger we now own 20 patents in blogging technology that are good for another 20 years! Since we already have the R&D for these patents completed, we can fire the new guys too! That's going to make our stock worth more!"

Investor "I'll buy that for a dollar!"

I really don't know if google is a good/bad company, I can't really say the above skit is anything more than fiction in regards to google, but I have seen similiar things happen in the business world. I just hope in another 15 years google doesn't go after all the people using their own open source blogging software claiming royaltee's on an idiotic patent.

Damn, I'm sounding a bit too YRO slashdotish today.

Think of the back-end info this gives them

So, now that they own Blogger and Blogspot, they basically have full-on, back-end access to all these blogs. They don't have to crawl websites to get information on what people are linking to (or what they say about those things). They can just pull it out of the (probably more-easily-interpreted) databases. Heck, they can even directly get activity data, and find out what things are being blogged in realtime (and thereby improve the quality of their news, as well as web, search results).

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

And all the trends they can presumedly spot and all the private emails they can nab as part of all the drivel...I mean data. Gotta be painful having to wade thru all that whining. This isn't fb. My point is to agree with the parent that the back end is the driver.

Anyone thinking this is so google can be a better neighbor isn't paying attention.

Your blogs belong to google. Hand 'em over.

Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them

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.

Cool.

I already use livejournal, but I could see blogging at google considering 80% of the time I am going to google.com and then looking up other stuff.

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.

Whats next?

I hope they buy ebay soon. I'd love for google to own ebay, paypal, half.com and all the other parts of the ebay empire.

Maybe some day in the not so distant future, google will be big enough to buy microsoft.

I dunno why I would want to but...

Lets say for whatever reason Id like to run a little blog action. Ive never really gotten into any blogs and I dont visit a single one on any kind of basis. However, Id like an easy way to basically journal. Some basic requirements:

Drop in a working apache server
Be able to simply add pictures, links, etc. Cant be too complicated tho
Option to keep a post private

Uh-oh

I think this is bad for Google. I see this as a trend akin to the famous "until it can read email" expansion trend for software. Google has won over users by being a search engine rather than the "portal" that everyone else was pimping at the time. I worry that they are turning into a portal themselves.

google...the *in thing* for CS folks

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

Google seems to be establishing a pattern with this purchase.

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

I'm puzzled. I can't see instant synergies. Let me explain why.

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

Should Google crawl every possible weblog constantly? Most of the popular blogs have in common that they update at least once a day or more. Google crawls those sites already more then once a day without problems, catching Zeitgeist.

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.

What is this Slashdot thing, anyway?

Slashdot is a weblog. More specifically, it's a content management system ("CMS" for all of you TLA fans). The term weblog covers the gamut of human interests from "Fluffy's Hairball of the Day" to political commentary from "Big Blue Basketballs". The term also includes topics that are parajournalistic, like industry and local news. Google will have to host all of it.

I have seen a lot of comments that bash or deride weblogs, but you are insulting the very thing that you are using to post your insults. In addition, Slashdot has a Journal feature that smacks of a weblog as well. Can we bite the hand that feeds us? Sure, but only at the risk of starvation.

ICQ vs. AIM.... again

This reminds me of the ICQ v. AIM a few years ago. ICQ dominated IM; AIM shows up and quickly takes over as the predominant IM service in town. Looks to me as if Google is poised to take the Blogger s/w to new levels of popularity and at some point surpassing Slashdot.org with some iteration of its own. It might even buy OSDN if the conditions for acquisition are optimal. Slashdot.org and the other affiliated blogs are HQ; the same was true with ICQ, and look who owns that little s/w.

OS Change?

Good....Now maybe the google folks can take a few of those *nix based 486 machines and replace the mess of M$ products that "run" blogger. I thought blogger was cool back in the day -- but was always perplexed as to the software choices they made in running such a big, complicated, heavy traffic service.

Might give blogspot.com blogs unfair advantage

Although Google now spiders my blog daily, that wasn't the case for the first month or two. Worse, Google rejected my pay($) Google textads as being "anti-establishmentarianism" and "anti-media." See my two [underreported.com] stories [underreported.com] about it.

If Google spiders blogspot.com blogs from day one, that gives them an unfair advantage.

Congrats to Pyra!

Wow, Evan is actually my girlfriends good friend - from a little bit back. From what she's told me, he's had some tough choices to make over the few years, but it sounds like he kept the dream alive and it has paid off - if that's the goal. I guess I could think of worse companies to be purchased by. Coulda gone to M$ and been wrapped into some shitty feauture in LookOut or MSN. ;)

Seriously tho, this is actually inspiring for me since I've always felt like I wanted to do my own idea(s) and there's always someone there - from the awful 'manager' to press to whatever else - putting down those ideas in favor of conformity or dissing them due to their lack of vision. That might not be Pyra's feelings, but to know someone has really stuck to their guns in face of all kinds of obstacles, gives me some hope to keep pushing forward.

A Solution?

Ah ha! Finally, a solution for the Google Time Bomb [microcontentnews.com]! Google would be able to filter out 85% of the blogs and show us the real (read: unblogged) results.

Google get knowledge

Google is aiming to provide global knowledge platform, covering lifelong learning and business intelligence

Boston Public Library.

Ironically, our Boston Public Library BPLers decline doing web logs that might give people a better idea of their expertise, experience and interests. Treasured BPLers talents remain relatively unknown because of the general atmosphere of discouragement, the difficulties of communicats at our city public library. Web logs give people opportunities to let others know of their expertise, experience and interests.

Bloggle or Bloogle?

While there is still much to be done with indexing using machine learning, there is a much greater payoff that is much more reachable using human brains as part of the process.

Web reviewers are one possibility, of course, but how many reviewers would it take to cover the web as it now sits - google just told me it is "searching 3,083,324,652 web pages".

Blogging and its relatives are probably far more powerful when allied with automatic page classification and ranking.

Suppose Google builds an extended blog format - perhaps with XML tags - and a tool to make entries using that format. This already gives them some more meta information that could be useful in building better searches.

And, as has been said, the ability to track the activity in a blog on a (sort of) real time basis gives them the capability to track news as it happens.

But there are more possibilities yet - just knowing the times entries are made gives you some information. If you have a blog coming from a specific user (track by cookies or even IP) you can correlate blog entries with google searches and with the user looking at other blogs. Sure, much of this will be uncorrelated, but add it all together and I suspect it will start to show interesting patterns. And much of this kind of information will only be available to an organization hosting the blogs.

I think there are other ways to extract more information from a blogger as well.

This could pay off big for Google as a search engine and augmented information indexer - most especially if they can get the human factors right and tempt a few more people into blogging.

(There's more - and in some rather more specific domains and contexts - but google seems uninterested in hiring me, so I don't see any good reason in giving them my ideas.)

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

No doubt Google Blogs will be cool. It will also be the crystal clear sign of feature creep that even naysayers will have to recognize.

Some Thoughts From The Missing Sock Drawer

This topic is of some interest to me because I just wrote a Google Widget that uses the Google API to do geographic searches of Blogs (it was just in SlashBack; godseye [godseye.com]).

No relationship to this acquisition, but it still felt vaguely spooky. I promise to get to the point. So skip the next paragraph.

It's also weird that people are talking about the Memex - just the other week I was chatting away in the Google API forums about amazon recommendation like incidental pathways found through client side bookmarking. And I actually think Google is going to continue to ignore client side improvements- but it will be interesting to see what new kinds of indexing they create for their own little ecosystem. Will they seperate semantic content?

The most striking part of all this is Google having a hand in the development of the Blogger API, which sets what is supposed to be evolving into an simple open standard for inter-blogware communication, invocation, et cetera. Some of the Google engineers must be pulling their hair out (yes, yes, I know that they're both brilliant and enlightened, but this is the chaotic frontier we're talking about here) trying to see where blogs / knowledge management systems (hello?) are taking the web as a whole in a hurry, search algorithms be damned.

Will Google also gain control of the syndication standards, whatever passes for RSS/XSS/whatever? How do you properly index ongoing permutations of feed standards, if everyone snarfs feeds, or if your base algorithms depend on pages mostly staying in one place? Maybe someone who feel that they know more about the future of syndication can enlighten.

Read what "Google Village" says

Elwyn Jenkins, who is behind Google Village [googlevillage.info] or Googlology Info Site [googlology.info] wrote a comment about this story minutes after we both discovered Dan Gillmor's article. His comments are available at Google Buys Pyra: Fuel for The Blogging World! [googlevillage.info]. Here are my comments about his story. "I agree with you, it's all about content. But there's a business aspect too. Larry and Sergey might run the technical show. But Eric Schmidt is here to take care of the business. And how Google will make money? By hosting bloggers for a fee? There were not so many paying customers for BlogSpot. And even imagine one million subscribers for $40 a year. That would not bring a great stream of revenue to Google. They must have an hidden idea."

Blogoshpere

The announcement is very exciting - I was there when he made it.

But it's scary, too.

At the panel. "Doc" Searles praised GeoCities as being an early example of web apps helping people publish online - empowering folks to put their own shit out there.

As former Senior Web Developer for GeoCities, I appreciate his sentiment. That's why I loved working there - and what makes the Internet special.

On the Net - no matter how much big media wants to monopolize it as a pipe to deliver the same old content - the Net is about the uploads, not the downloads. It's about you, and me, and that grrrl over there.

I fervently hope the Google purchase of Pyra doesn't result in a Borg-like assimilation of Blogger.com; GeoCities _disappeared_ as a brand after we were assimilated by Yahoo!

If Blogger lowers the threshold by making web publishing as easy as sending an email, the other interesting tidbit that came out of the Blogosphere event was the demonstration of audio blogging [audblog.com] from the folks from AudBlog.com.

Dial AudBlog, enter your s3kr!+ PIN on the cell phone, and you're on the air! You can hold up the phone to record events (this was the mind-blowing way they showed off the product) or talk to the hand to "tell your story."

If Blogger made self-publishing as easy as email AudBlog makes it easy as dialing a phone!

Congrats to the Pyra people, props to Doc, and good luck AudBlog!

Re:what's the limit?

Technically I have 3 (all lumped into 1 really) and I help run 3 more...

Re:what's the limit?

Maybe your friends and family? That's pretty much what I think blogs are best for... A place where you can post updates on what's going on in your life for people close to you to read.

News for Nerds, Stuff that matters

Slashdot is about "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters"; it's not exactly for mass majority. That's why people like you and I love this site and post number of messages. It's focused; it targets a certain type of population. This will not affect Slashdot.

Having said that, this Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs is pretty interesting because Google (until today) targets mass majority and Pyra Labs, if I understand correctly, does not target mass majority. Blogging is only for a certain type of population. How would Google transform that into stuff for mass majority if they plan to do so? Interesting to see what they are going to do with Pyra Labs's technologies.

Re:Great!

1)Buy blog company
2)Spend $101M/yr for 2 yrs.
3)???
4)Profit!

How stupid do you think people are?

Re:Helping with the death of weblogging.

I love the irony of this comment. I only pity the author for writing his thoughts down and then commenting on how nobody cares about them anyway.

Of course, the AC also missed one important fact. When someone writes things in a blog, do they actually CARE if anyone reads them? I know I don't.

Re:Helping with the death of weblogging.

Well yeah, fine, you do get complete assholes posting random fsck to their sites, but some of the personal sites are pure gold. RealBastard [realbastard.net] is a fantastic example of how great blogging can be. It's when people just post crappy Lord of The Rings pics and pictures of various housebroken animals, and a running commentary of how they got drunk/stoned off their ass, "W00t!!!1"s and all, that it gets irritating.

Blogs can be good for many things. Exposing corporate shams, for instance. If you say what the fsckwad in a certain CompUSA store said/did to you, you are helping people make an informed decision.

This should work well for Google. (Says the person who asked if google.com free email would be available soon!) =)

Re:Helping with the death of weblogging.

> Free clue: No one gives a damn about you, or your thoughts. Thank you, drive through.

I have a few friends and family members who read mine to see what I 've been up to lately. There are a few that I read for the same reasons. I'm certain that you don't give a damn about me or them, but the feeling is mutual. We don't do it for you so piss off.

Re:Ick

It probably has something to do with the term
weB-LOG. Or simply stated a Blog
Are you an idiot or just trolling??

Re:Helping with the death of weblogging.

Yeah, this is typical elitist geek preaching here. You see this a lot when the so called commoners invade someones previously limited turf. I agree, there are a lot of garbage sites out there - but don't visit if you don't like it. I'd say most personal bloggers don't really care if anyone reads their stuff, I do wonder why they feel the need to put their personal thoughts out in public instead of a sprial notebook - but who cares.