Is Google turning into a media content company?

This is the question raised by this article of Clickz. At the Search Engine Strategies New York panel discussion, couple of speakers of the Mountain View company talked about developping more and more destination pages. Google is developing indeed an offer of media content that is getting bigger and bigger. It started with google news, google videos, and more recently google finance.

The main concern for other media companies is about the search engine ranking impartiality: Does Google five the favor to its own content? Some people are wondering:
"Battelle also wondered whether Google gives preferential treatment to its own content, such as Google Finance over Yahoo Finance, a popular finance Web site. "It's interesting, if you put in 'stocks,' Google Finance comes up first... It used to be that Yahoo was first," he said.
I think that Google, which is struggling with its stock value, is seeking for new source of revenues. Shareholders are getting angry as Google's stock is dropping, mainly because of an over rated pricing based on expected revenue growth."

Google strongly states their result is based on relevance. I think it is right, as Google's core strength is to have the most relevant searches on the market. Changing this fact will affect Google's market share for sure. However, if Google struggle with its share price, temptation might change the status.

Is is a good technique? Google owns a monopolistic-kind of position on the search engine market, and therefore its customers (companies using google Adwords to communicate) can't really do much about it. Also they have a technological competitive advantage that insure them of keeping their leading position on at least for a long time (don't ask me how long, Internet market is so fast it is hard to tell). Let's not forget that Yahoo! has tried this technique of differentiation of developing high quality content, which did not help it much to face Google. Google is not in the situation of Yahoo at this time which was a challenger loosing its influence.

Google is experimenting new products and services to keep its fast pace growth, but it should not forget its core trade and key factor of success: searching. The strength of Google has been able to focus on his business model, and should prevent it as much as possible.

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