Google and Reuters: Why Buy the Cow?
Ah Jeez. Google buying Reuters?

Gary Stein doesn't think it will happen. Me neither, but I'm going to pick on his post a little bit.

He asks: "do the engines need to diversify their services, specifically away from the content-capture/indexing business?"

Am I missing something Gary? Yahoo and MSN already create/own their own content.

And consider Ask's (don't-call-me-an-answer-engine) Smart Answers: a structured data search pulling from vertical databases like the yellow pages or citysearch. And Yahoo's local UGC. And the Froogle/Map/Desktop/etc results pushed to the top of Google's SERPs.

Across the engines we're seeing add ons to the ten blue links that are moves away from the "content-capture/indexing business."

Could these add ons go prime time though if trade organizations and governments "start looking more closely [at web crawling], and potentially determining whether or not there needs to be limits[?]"

I don't think it will come to that. I think that any potential limits - if somehow US government decided that robots.txt weren't enough - wouldn't take more than a few million pages out of anyones index. And who the hell is it that wants out?

Like Stein I don't believe Google will buy Reuters. Why would it buy the cow when it gets the milk for free?

If Google has word of some coming anti-news indexing legislature that it suspects it can't beat (from some frikin idiot conglomeration of news organizations that don't want traffic - or maybe Rupert Murdoch), then I can see reason for buying Reuters.

Stein thinks they might want Reuters because they could control its structure and package it/parse it out in Smart Answer fashion. I guess I could see that too, but why buy instead of partner?

The Reuters buy just doesn't add up to me... unless there's some legislature coming we haven't heard of.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |