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Google buys Pyra Labs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

Argyle writes "SiliconValley.com reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event."

5 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. The Google Catapult by KFury · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.

    Curiosities I have are how Google will deal with it's first for-pay service, and what, if any, value-adds Google will give to Blogger blogs: Higher rankings in search results? Possibly. Live posting into Google's search index? Probably. I'm sure there are ideas that haven't even been thought of yet.

    I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.

    --

    Kevin Fox
  2. Nothing so big by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is not a big news actually, as people wanted it to be. Searching and Blogging are different things. Webblogging will reach its limits soon, since not everyone is eager to put something out there. It is a personal choice, and blogging, although still with growth potential, will not become the next big thing. Google's decision is in some way a very good decision, since we need a tool to search blogs, separately, just like Google News. Google is right again on the issue. Blogging will be important.

  3. Think of the back-end info this gives them by jshare · · Score: 5, Insightful
    So, now that they own Blogger and Blogspot, they basically have full-on, back-end access to all these blogs. They don't have to crawl websites to get information on what people are linking to (or what they say about those things). They can just pull it out of the (probably more-easily-interpreted) databases. Heck, they can even directly get activity data, and find out what things are being blogged in realtime (and thereby improve the quality of their news, as well as web, search results).

    This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.

    --
    Jordan

    1. Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them by Scarblac · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.

      Also, Google News works great, except it is sometimes slow to react to current events (Shuttle breakdown took a few hours to appear or so?). Blogs are known to be very fast information suppliers if a crisis is going on. Perhaps News can use the Blogs to spot something important quickly.

      --
      I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
  4. Why I am puzzled by Voelspriet · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I'm puzzled. I can't see instant synergies. Let me explain why.

    a. Google News

    Dan Gillmor, who broke this story, mentioned in an update the possibility, that the weblog links can be used to improve Google News.

    But Google doesn't need to buy Pyra for that. Google can spider any leading weblog they want. Yes, there was this problem of interlinked weblogs resulting in a high PR (PageRank) for certain logs, but Google fixed that problem by giving more value to outgoing links then incoming links. They don't need to buy Blogger for indexing of weblogs.

    b. Portal

    Another suggestion that has been made: Google is moving to a portal.

    I refuse to believe that Google is getting megalomanic. Besides, we all know what happened to AltaVista.

    c. Direct access

    Jshare suggested Google bought Blogger to get direct access to blog data.

    But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?

    d. Journal with ads

    Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.

    But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).

    Whatever the reason is behind the buy, it will have a huge impact. The simple fact that one of the hottest internet companies buys Pyra's Blogger will make the product main stream in months.

    Henk van Ess editor of Voelspriet

    TIP: Check Ovidiu Predescu site now and then. He started working at Google's on January 22 and writes about it in his ...weblog.