Archive: June, 2006

Ok, I’m a day late posting this – I was working on patent relate docs until late last night, and by the time I left, I was done. But better late than never here’s my thoughts…

Eric Schmidt said “”It looks like people have some good browsers choices already,” Schmidt said. “We would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser,”

No one ever suggested that Google build a browser for the fun of it. Do they do anything just because it catches their fancy? However, leaving aside what was likely just a flippant response, I think the key word therein is “build” Why build a new one at all?

Google did a deal with AOL last year; AOL owns Netscape, and unfortunately, messed up with their last browser launch. Why wouldn’t Google buy the Netscape browser, and re-release it? Netscape likely doesn’t fit in any of AOL’s plans, but it a logical play for Google.

Look at the irony; Netscape was “killed” by Microsoft’s IE browser. A few short years later, Google and MSFT are locked in battle. A re-launched Netscape browser, fully tied into Google’s offerings; gmail, finance, etc… would be very attractive, and lots of marketing appeal.

I just read an excellent article at Business Week Online about Google. Nothing earthshattering, but a very fair and balanced synopsis of how phenomenally well Google does in search and online advertising, and how it struggles in so many other ventures.

Back in April Richard blogged about Think Partnership signing a letter of intent to purchase IceRocket. I just read on Marketing Pilgrim that the deal fell through. I wonder what happened?

Ask.com just launched a new blog search service. The blog & feed search is accessible from Ask’s homepage, or via Ask’s Bloglines site, which the company purchased over a year ago.

Unlike other blog search engines, Ask’s blog & feed search does not crawl the web to index material. Instead, it indexes blog content subscribers to Bloglines have already tagged as relevant. Ask claims this process will offer fresher content than other blog engines that comb the web, and will avoid returning spam.

Blogs can be sorted by relevance, date (hour, day, week and month) and popularity (works off the number of subscribers to a particular blog).