Wednesday, October 26, 2005

GOOGLE: MORE TO COME

The following is a list of items from a screen shot of Google Base. It was copied from seweso's blog:

"Course Schedules
Events and Activities
Housing
Jobs
News and Articles
People Profiles
Products
Reference Articles
Reviews
Services
Travel
Vehicles
Wanted Ads"

This is just a small list. Google Base. will allow each user to post in a "standard category" or he may create his own category.

I sold shares in EBAY today to buy more Google. EBAY is a power house company with a natural monopoly in autions. The problem for me is that more and more of EBAY "stores" are not really auctions but just list of inventory. It seems to me that folks will opt for free inventory posting versus the EBAY listing.

One can argue all day that EBAY has a payment system set up and an anti fraud system in place. Indeed the "trust me" features in EBAY are of great comfort to buyers. However, I believe huge amounts of posting will be done in Google Base if the posting is free. It will become natural to do a search from a browser rather than to go to EBAYto do a search.

To me, it is like looking up a phone number in a phone book versus typing a search into a browser. Why not let the computer do the work in a fraction of the time?

One blogger suggest that AOL has a few search features that are better than Googles features. The thing that makes Google powerful is the simplicity of searching for everything from the same spot. Revenues went up better than 100% year over year and the public will now be invited to supply reams of new content; more growth to come!

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