ON GOOGLE BASE AND THE COMING CRAWL BRAWL WARS

SHOTS HEARD AROUND THE WORLD?

It's deja vu. 

Back in 1994, the Internet was an innocent place, primarily run by and for education and government interests.  By 1995, it was on the cusp of commercialization with the early IPOs of "for profit" internet service providers like Netcom, PSI and UUNET, followed of course by the seminal Netscape IPO.  And we haven't looked back on the commercial internet since those humble beginnings of Web 1.0.

Well at least until Web 2.0, which in theory started two to three years ago.  Since then we've been in a nice, comfy, touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy world of "peer production" (see recent post on USV Sessions) and sharing our stuff for the common good (see posts here and here for more).

But by the beginning of next year, the blinkers AND the gloves should have fully come off.

Companies that co-existed and cooperated with others in a "Web 2.0" spirit will likely sharpen their pencils.

Users who contribute their blood, sweat, tears to their passions and interests online will increasingly ask, "what's in it for moi?"

It's starting already...anecdotal examples abound.

The poster child for altruistic web 2.0 cooperation, classifieds giant Craigslist, is increasingly defining which new web 2.0 vertical search companies may crawl its site and content and which may not.  P2P-driven job service Indeed is OK, but quasi-competitor Oodle is not.

Google, the super power who crawls the internet's oceans at will does not allow other sites to crawl Google, following a policy of "don't crawl us, we'll crawl you".

eBay investors are a jitter and a twitter at the prospects of a Google Base competing with its core e-commerce and classifieds listings businesses.  Some, like entrepreneur Mark Pincus are already writing somewhat premature, but thought-provoking obituaries for eBay, pronouncing it FOA (Freebay on Arrival).

No one knows yet if Google will go to war mildly or vigourously with it's largest advertising customer.  Of course eBay in recent years painstakingly made its vast listings databases crawlable by Google and other search engines to maximize revenues in the short-term.

It seemed like a simple bargain at the time...Google, you crawl us and bring us the queries, for which we will pay you upon click, and then do our darndest to convert into revenues and profits. 

Thousands of web businesses large and small have entered into similar unofficial pacts with Google.

Until of course Google, like Microsoft before it, decides that the business in question is part of its long-term mission:

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

One can scarcely contemplate a world where all the major portals may participate in a Worldwide Crawl War (WCW) where each blocks the other's right to crawl any or all parts of its sites.  Perhaps a Google vs. eBay/Amazon/Yahoo!/Microsoft/AOL coalition re-alignment may be in our future.

The worldwide web could go dark for users if that were to happen.  No longer would we be conveniently able to put a query in a little search box and find our heart and mind's desires at the flick of the "enter" key. 

Instead, we'd have to search a bunch of different sites separately.

No one in the coalition-to-be wants to make the "IBM mistake", and for some the "Google mistake" twice.  As I noted in a July post outlining how IBM gave away the store in the early eighties:

"It happened in some part because IBM slipped up and gave Microsoft the opportunity to own the software platform. And while Microsoft created a near-monopoly around it, they also created a tremendous eco-system of application vendors, and hardware partners who all made some money off this new horizontally organized computer industry.  Companies like Dell ran with the ball and created wondrous manufacturing and distribution systems with a turbo-charged financial model. 

But it may all have been an aberration.  No one in their right mind is going to make the mistake of giving away another software monopoly, whether it's in the world of networked computers, handtops, PDAs, cell phones, TV cable boxes, personal digital video recorders and so on. The IBM/Microsoft lesson has been too well learned.

We're more apt to see mistakes of companies giving away the store in areas other than software.  In fact, in the last decade (late nineties), Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! collectively gave away the search store to a start up called Google, by using Google's search engine for their search services, while ALLOWING Google to build-up a separately branded, relatively open platform of their own.  The rest is history with Google's market cap being almost $90 billion to Yahoo!'s $46 billion, Time Warner (AOL) parent)'s $78 billion, and Microsoft-still-the-champ's $285 billion."

Things are still the same, only Google's market cap is higher.

We're all going get more flinty-eyed about what we expect in return for our attention.  Web 2.0 is growing up and adopting the clarion cry of Web 1.0:  "Show me the money!"

Comments

[imphaldiary]

As an ordinary user your post to me is an eye opener. keep informing. keep up the good work.

[Cashmore]

"Don't crawl us, we'll crawl you"

Hehe! For some reason, that one really cracked me up! And you're right - the gloves are bound to come off soon.

And if Google really does release Wallet, it's going to have to get tough on scammers while offering weak customer service ala Paypal - surely this will put Google's squeaky-clean image on the line.