Why Google Bought FeedBurner
In a few years, we’ll look up the word genius in the dictionary and it will be spelled ‘GOOGLE’. Considering the smarts of Google founder’s Brin and Page (their moms didn’t raise stupid children), they’ll probably convince us to spell it GOOG so we buy more of their stock. One has to dig deeper into the logic of buying Feedburner and I think I figured it out yesterday.
I posted to one of our blogs yesterday and within five minutes, the post was in Google’s main search engine. Not the blog search which looks like it’s in Forever Beta but the real Google Search Engine (you know, the big time). Look at Feedburner as a distribution facility. Just assume that Feedburner now owns more of the feed management market than anyone else, Google may have bought a commodity more valuable than their search algorithms. If we conclude and we should that search is about relevance and more about speed and relevance, then who can now be faster than Google if they own the distribution center. Until now, search has been all about relevance and amount of relevance that a search engine can place in front of you. But imagine tomorrow that a new disease is discovered called Slomenia and websites have to create content and then send the content to their webmasters and then hopefully, the webmasters post it on a timely basis. Then the spiders and crawlers and all the other programs that find content for us junkies have to find the content and then index the content. If Slomenia is discovered tomorrow, I can bet you that at least 50 bloggers in the world will become knowledgeable very quickly about Slomenia because that’s what bloggers do. Here’s the magic, Google will have the ability to plug this content into their search engines quickly and you can bet, while still keeping relevance in mind. That’s what I mean by speed. For the context of this post, I don’t mean speed of searching the term ‘money’ and getting the search results. That’s easy. Speed in the future will mean how quickly relevant content is now indexed by the major engines.
Do you think their competitors such as MSN are going to get the feeds faster than Google’s own access? Or is Google going to make sure that the most relevant and important posts are going to hit Google’s search engine and Google News and Google this before anyone else gets the feed.
In my opinion, Google is creating the same competitive advantage now that Mr. Gates had with Windows so many years ago. Down the road, we may see Brin and Page in front of this country’s next great trial lawyer. I could see it now.
First Question: And isn’t true that you have access to your feeds quicker than any of your competitors and that’s why you own the news industry besides the search industry and the blog industry?
Objection Your Honor, leading the witness !!
