It has been an awesome week in the world of search, in every sense of the word.
This week opened with Yahoo!’s acquisition of Right Media on Monday and is closing with persistent rumours of a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft. Somehow it seems fitting Yahoo! stories should bookend the week. It has been a week of enormous change on the web, the events of which will effect how information is presented for years to come.
On Tuesday, the largest user revolt in the history of the Internet took place, crashing Digg’s network and shattering any illusions of control founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson might have shared.
On Wednesday, Google released its next step in personalization, the iGoogle personalized homepage. (See “Google’s Personalized Homepage Gets More Personal“, by Arnold Zafra in SearchEngineJournal.com for more details.)
Thursday was subtly quiet but below the surface, two huge mergers in the information world were being discussed.
The first involves the Dow Jones Company which owns the Wall St. Journal. After the family which controls the Dow Jones shunned an offer of $5billion from Robert Murdoch’s News Corp., speculation has focused on Microsoft, General Electric, and even Google as potential buyers. The second rumour has Thompson Corp or News Corp buying the Reuters News Wire agency.
Today’s talk of Microsoft and Yahoo might be shrugged off as MicroHooey! but it does point to few important lessons to draw from this week.
#1 – We have re-entered the era where big is everything. We’ve been here before and that pervious period of rapid paced growth produced some very undesirable outcomes.
#2 – Consolidation is cutting like a scythe across the information sector.
#3 – The world of online marketing is growing beyond the comfortable confines of search.
#4 – The pace of change is accelerating.
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