Dec

On Google’s Franchise (and McCormick’s)

Filed in: Adsense by admin on 12-11-09

Google has a competitive advantage. In fact, one might even say it has a franchise in web search. I wouldn’t say that. I mean, Google does have a franchise; but, it doesn’t have a monopoly on web search and never will. There are real problems with Google’s model that are often overlooked. It does a poor job of finding certain sites that are difficult to describe in keywords. For this reason, there may still be a market for web search in the form of specialized niche directories and in some of these “social search engines” (e.g., Stumble Upon) for many years to come.

I’m not suggesting any of these services will be as successful as Google; I’m sure they won’t be. I am simply pointing out that there is a difference between a need and the means by which that need is satisfied. Even as the dominant search player, Google will only have a franchise on the means (keyword search); it will not have a franchise on the need (finding stuff on the web). Also, Google can not, at present, rightly be called the dominant search player. There is no dominant player in search. Google is the leading search player. It is also the catalyst for many changes in search. But, it is not yet the dominant player in search the way McCormick (MKC) is the dominant U.S. spice producer.

Looking at McCormick’s franchise is actually a pretty good way of evaluating Google’s. Why do I say McCormick is the dominant player (domestically) in spice, but Google is not yet the dominant player in search? There are a few reasons.

McCormick has a 45% share of the U.S. retail spice market. Its closest competitor has a 12% market share. We may differ about exactly how the web search pie is carved up. But, I think we can agree that Google’s share of the market is less than 45%, and that at least two of its competitors have a share of the market greater than 12%. So, Google’s position differs from McCormick’s in two material respects (already). Google has a smaller slice of the pie, and the search market is less fragmented than the spice market.

The spice market is an upside down funnel. The few producers are at the top. They feed their products through three distribution paths: retail, industry, and restaurants. In each case, the shape of the upside down funnel remains intact, because the widening happens at the very end. The ultimate consumer of McCormick’s product doesn’t get to choose from all available spices. His choice is always indirect. He picks a grocery store, a food product, or a restaurant. Then, must choose from the spices that particular supermarket chooses to carry, or the restaurant he frequents chooses to use (and/or make available).

In search the story’s a little different. There is still something of an upside down funnel shape in search. Although, it is less pronounced than it was a few years ago. Search results are fed through dependent sites that searchers visit. But, it is the searcher who chooses the dependent sites. A few of these dependent sites account for a large part of all searches. That is very different from the spice market, where no supermarket or restaurant chain accounts for a large part of all spice consumption – none even comes close. So, the searcher has a much bigger role in choosing his search provider than the spice consumer has in choosing his spice provider. Even though it is true you are sometimes searching without knowing Google is the search provider, the situation is nothing like it is at McCormick. When eating a meal you aren’t thinking about McCormick. Quite often, however, you are using a McCormick product. Whether it was in that package of spices you used to cook a meal at home, or in that manufactured food product, or in the dish you ordered at the restaurant, you are a consuming a McCormick product.

What matters as far as the investor is concerned is that the ultimate consumer of McCormick’s product rarely makes an active, unfettered choice to consume that product over all other competing products (or even many competing products). The closest he comes to making such a choice is at the supermarket; though even there, the decision of how much shelf space to allocate to each company’s products was made for him. To use Google, the first time searcher must make an active, unfettered choice.

Finally, there is the matter of infrastructure. This consists of two parts: production and distribution. McCormick has an existing production infrastructure which is helpful as far as costs are concerned, but isn’t especially valuable. It could be duplicated by a new entrant with deep pockets. McCormick’s distribution infrastructure is almost impossible to duplicate. It is worth far more than it cost McCormick to create it. Prying McCormick’s customers (situated at the narrow of that inverted funnel) away from the company’s products would not be easy. This distribution infrastructure gives solidity to McCormick’s spice franchise in the U.S. In some instances, it will also help McCormick aboard (as some of the company’s customers are expanding globally and will be inclined to stick with McCormick in their overseas operations).

Google’s production infrastructure (the algorithm and the index) is easy to duplicate and will become even easier to duplicate in the future. There isn’t much of a barrier to entry here. Google may currently offer the best search service around, but there is no reason to believe this will always be the case. Distribution is very often the most valuable part of any franchise (it is usually the part that is hardest to duplicate).

So, the natural question is: in the world of search, if you build it will they come? Will the best search engine always attract the most searchers? Probably not. That’s good for Google, because it won’t always be the best search engine. Google has a great brand. Whatever value is in Google comes from that brand. That brand is what will keep searchers from flocking to the inevitable newer, better search engine.

All of Google’s revenues are ultimately dependant upon attracting searches. Getting those searches requires two things. First, millions of people must make the active, unfettered choice to search Google. Then, those millions of people must keep searching with Google. The brand is the key to step one. The service is the key to step two. Search customers are sticky. But, they probably aren’t as sticky as we think. It’s very easy to take immediate action on the web (just click a link). Switching away from Google isn’t like switching away from Windows.

That leaves the brand. True, when you think search, you think Google. But, is that brand worth $120 billion? No – and neither is Google.

Geoff Gannon writes a daily value investing blog and produces a twice weekly (half hour) value investing podcast at www.gannononinvesting.com

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Dec

Google’s Forecast For A Speedier Internet

Filed in: Adsense by admin on 12-05-09

Google is currently the top search engine company in the industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their biggest weapon – their clusters of datacenters). Although they’re at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is definitely what they’re continually using to bring the company forward. Google’s engineers are continually working on ways to improve their search engine’s performance and to give additional features that will enhance user experience.

Although it could be very easy to miss because of its sheer simplicity, speed is one of the key reasons why Google is number one. They understood early on that in order to provide a top-notch user experience, search results must be delivered to the user in the shortest time possible. Even when on a dial up connection, Google has designed its search engine in such a way that the web search results appear in a snap. One might say that Google has perfected the speed aspect of search engine results delivery, but displaying the list of results is just half of the story. What happens when a user clicks on the result is also an important component in the overall experience of the search engine user. Google therefore wants to improve on the Internet for the user searching for information. Improving the speed of the Internet for the users is also important to Google’s other mission: to bring software applications that a user uses from the desktop to the web. The idea of network computing is something that is not entirely new, but it is only lately that we are seeing a start (albeit still slow and not without its own share of challenges) towards the right direction. Products like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, Google Calendar and Writely are testament to this Company mission.

So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how Google intends to improve the speed at which information is retrieved and delivered to the user.

We’ll start with what Google is doing now to address the problem of speed, moving on later on the company’s future plans, clues of which can be found in the company’s patent applications.

Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means that the browser will download a web page to the user’s computer even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded quickly from user’s computer memory.

The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the user is using.

The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user, but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user. Search being the second most popular activity done by users on the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of many Internet users.

“Predictive information retrieval” and “anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine” -two patent applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing: anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search results faster and more personalized for the user.

The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends partial queries to the Google servers that are actually predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what you are looking for based both on what other people are looking for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what it knows about the user. This can include the user’s search history or other factors. Google can then display the list of suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will make searching experience speedier for the user, and will smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.

Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that’s why it’s also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and customers. In the same way that we don’t know how we managed to live in a world of dial up connection now that we’re on broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the Internet.

http://www.theinternetone.net

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Dec

The Shot Heard Around the World: Google’s Endorsment of “get Google Ads Free”

Filed in: Adsense by admin on 12-04-09

Within just weeks people everywhere were talking about it, and

other top-notch online marketers were scurrying to sell it as an

Affiliate for the company.

But here’s a little insight that 99.9% of everyone the world over

doesn’t know:

The Product’s greatest endorser is none other than Google itself!

That’s right. As shocking as it may seem, Google has NO problem

with the course that reveals how anyone can get ads on their search

engine for Free!

Now, at this point I know you must be curious as to how such a

thing is possible, as Google makes its money from the sale of both

AdWords (PPCs) and AdSense (where webmasters allow Google to show

their ads on their pages).

One might think that any information that revealed how an

advertiser could get their AdWords pay-per-clicks free would be

damaging to Google, and therefore Google would not want anyone

finding out about it, right?

WRONG! It seems that the secret system developed by the retired

native New York doctor contains an interesting “twist” that while

allowing advertisers to eliminate their AdWords costs, it does not

reduce a single dollar in AdWords revenue for Google.

In fact, just the opposite!

I cannot give away the secret here because that’s why it’s for sale

in the first place.

But I can tell you that with the application of what’s inside “Get

Google Ads Free” that:

- Google loses NO money

- Google actually can make even more M0NEY!

- Advertisers gain an instant almost unfair advantage over anyone

not knowing what’s inside “Get Google Ads Free!”

- Advertisers can now afford to outbid their competition!

- Advertisers are not at risk any longer as their advertising

budgets no longer matter!

Wow! And this is just the beginning!

Now, where’s the definitive PROOF that Google endorses “Get Google

Ads Free?”

I asked this question to company spokesperson and Vice President of

Sales & Marketing, Mr Todd Coutrin, to which he responded:

—————————————————-

“We started our launch like we always do with any product online,

using Google AdWords to offer our Product.

“We used keywords that contained the word ‘free’ so we anticipated

the usual HOLD these keywords usually cause any campaign using them

to experience.

“But when our campaign was paused by Google for a tad more time

than what we regularly anticipated, then we got concerned.

“I actually placed a call directly to Google at 1-866-2-GOOGLE and

spoke at length with a customer services rep who said she’d check

into what was happening.

“She returned my call 16 hours later and informed me that due to the

specific nature of the Product in question (i.e., “Get Google Ads

Free!”) their team at Google secured the product, read it all the

way trough, and then realizing it would NOT hurt their revenue but

actually increase it, they immediately un-paused and resumed our

ads”

—————————————————-

Amazing! They actually got what amounts to a Signed Certificate of

APPROVAL from Google itself!

Therefore, anyone who questions the truth or legality concerning

“Get Google Ads Free!” need not fret at all.

Yet, the usual “naysayers” seemed to ignore the obvious fact that

if Google had a problem with “Get Google Ads Free!” then we all

wouldn’t be seeing all the PPC ads at Google each time we type in

the keywords and phrases:

- free ads

- free advertising

- “Get Google Ads Free”

- free ppc

- free adwords

And so forth!

Yet, there are many very stubborn, even foolish, among us.

To be fair, I must also inform you of those who seem to be out to

get the company for sharing their amazing secret with the world.

In what seems nothing more than a ploy to get attention, a UK

online firm operated by two wanna-be law students have a Blog that

talks the usual trash about the Product.

The Blog’s owner, Rob Scott, talks a big game by claiming the

secret system to be nothing short of a scam! He even recklessly

throws around the potentially libelous phrase “.con (Ooops, I

meant .com)” as an attempt at childish humor in order to bash the

firm’s name.

What’s shocking is that this individual is actually a student of

law (at least that’s what he claims) so one would think that he

should perhaps check out the facts before proceeding with such

careless remarks.

After all, he admits severally that he “never even ordered the

ebook” so how could he truly know one way or the other if it was a

valid system – not to mention it is assumed he’s at least

reasonably intelligent since (according to him) he got into law

school, that he would be able to see for himself the firm’s

Affiliates’ ads all over Google, and therefore reason that Google

itself is perhaps the firm’s chief supporter.

But stubbornness abounds, I suppose.

Ironically Rob says that the only reason he attacks the firm is

because “it’s a no brainer that this must be a scam,” and he got

“tired of seeing all those little AdSense ads on his page that

people kept clicking on” (which by the way only stood to make him

lots of M0NEY!) — yet he accepts donations on his site as a poor,

struggling law student in need of paying for his education, and

rather than legitimately earn an income from AdSense with an

APPROVED Product.

Sadly, Rob actually censors most of his Blog so that others who wish

to post POSITIVES concerning “Get Google Ads Free!” can’t even do

so. (But what would you expect from a wanna-be lawyer?)

He even posts what appears to be an actual response by the firm’s

lawyer, but which is perhaps nothing more than his own posts

disguised and designed to make himself look better (as anyone can

see that the dialogue appears manufactured instead of genuine).

What some people will do to project themselves as “savior to the

rest of us” and “the people’s advocate.” How ridiculous indeed.

Anyway, don’t be dissuaded in your decision to build your online

business by eliminating your Google AdWords costs, as the course

“Get Google Ads Free!” not only reveals precisely how you can do

this, but it goes 10 steps further by giving you all kinds of other

amazing strategies I can’t even begin to allude to here.

Plus, the e-course comes with countless resources that go far beyond

the usual variety of instantly-clickable extra values!

Lastly never forget that even though quite elderly now, Dr Jon

Cohen has even set new records finishing ahead of himself by now

having:

- Grossed over $400 Million in revenues!!

- and SAVED over $100 Million in Google advertising costs!!

..all due to his own system!

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is!

So if you’d like to get in on all the action, then go grab this

amazing “BREAKTHROUGH” for yourself only at:

http://sweetsell.freegoogle.hop.clickbank.net

As one very famous Internet Marketer said it best:

“This is a weapon that should be in every Internet and Affiliate

Marketer’s arsenal and library!”

Get it directly from the good doctor himself!

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Dec

The Shot Heard Around the World, Google,s Endorsement of “get Google Adds Free”

Filed in: Adsense by admin on 12-04-09

My name is Roger Preston, and I am a journalist for various

publications in upstate New York, as well as the New England area.

I recently had a chance to interview the fine team of professionals

at WebBusinessSecrets.com whose flagship product is entitled “Get

Google Ads Free.”

In April of 2007 “Get Google Ads Free” was launched, and the effect

was nothing less than equal to “the shot heard around the world!”