Google buys Pyra Labs

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."

Comments

I think

[mrpuffypants]

This has the potential to be huge... Google Blogs..

Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.

Mark another one up for Google being one of the best tech companies in the business world.

Re:I think

[c.emmertfoster]

As though you couldn't already search within a particular domain using Google.

Look, Google is a great search engine, but that doesn't mean that everything it touches turns to gold. It's not "the next big thing," nor is it a silly buzzword that you can bander around randomly.

Re:I think

[jesdynf]

If you sit down and look at it, Google's "things touched/things that are 24-karat gold" ratio is exceptional.

They did this for a reason. I can think of many cool things they could do with this. They, I'm pretty sure, can think up more.

I'm going to make a guess -- backed up, mind, by both their past performance and the general attitude that they exhibit -- that whatever they're up to -will be- the next big thing.

Or something that darn well could've -been- the next big thing and deserved to be explored.

Re:I think

[jesdynf]

If you don't have any idea what they're going to be doing with it, what business do you have reproaching it?

Based on their past performance...

Google image search? Hoo yeah.

Maps, phonebooks, toolbar, search-term
spellchecker? Good ideas all, if not earthshattering, but it shows a consistent effort to improve the utility and relevance of their product.

Google News? Big pluses here.

Google Answers? Heh. Okay. But like I said, it deserved to be explored.

Google AdWords? They found -advertising- that -doesn't suck-. Yeesh. What does it take to impress you? ... based on that, they're up to something that bears close attention. I can't speak to the -profitability- of it, but they're still here, at least.

If your opinion differs, so be it, but I'm not sure you're basing it on -anything- other than reflexive avoidance of a perceived agenda.

Re:I think

[nomadic]

Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.

Sweet screaming monkeys would that be pointless. Blogs are like dreams; they're only interesting to the people they belong to. If by some freakish twist of fate I cared about your last trip to Reno or what kind of sandwich you ate last week, I'd ask you.

Ten years later...

[cliffy2000]

On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.

Re:Ten years later...

[oconnorcjo]

On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.

IBM
CISCO
AMD
Intel (ok -they get some flack but they are not hated)
NVidia

The Slashdot crowd (for the most part) do not care how big a corporation is, but how good the service they provide. As long as Google remains just awesome, the slashdot crowd will kiss its solid gold ass.

Great :(

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

So as if my searches weren't already becoming diluted with Blog drivel they definitely will now!

The Google Catapult

[KFury]

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.

Nothing so big

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nothing so big

[LinuxXPHybrid]

> Webblogging will reach its limits soon, since not everyone is eager to put something out there.

As of today, blogging population is quite small (considering the size of the general internet users). But what if blogging becomes one of common features that free directory service offers? Typical directory service today is just email and maybe address book you might get home page address, but that's it. No blogging (typically). What if blogging becomes widely available? AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and all these crap providers offer blogging? People want to express their thoughts and opinions. It's just that stuff like making web page was too damn hard for most people to express their thoughts and opinions and also it was difficult to communicate with others. Blogging is much easier. It has potential (I think).

just me or ..

[josh crawley]

Is it just me or does it seem that Google is trying to become the number 1 information portal?

Re:just me or ..

[c.emmertfoster]

No, you're missing my point entirely. Google is not just starting out, and Google is not "another upstart portal wannabe."

Yahoo, as an example of a portal site, uses Google as a web-searching tool. Frankly, I don't see why Google would want to move towards being a portal site, when that niche is already filled by a number of quality sites.

I hope this works out for the good.

[sawilson]

It would be nice if the overall impact of this is
more even more people participating because of the
google tie-in. It would be very very nice if it got
so big that all kinds of news that our mostly
corporate influenced media didn't report on got out
and about and all around. I hope this turns into
one very huge good thing.

Pay for blogs

[neotrex]

Internet connection ......... $30.00 Getting a blog .............. $10.00 Highest Google rating ....... $250.00 The whole word seeing my daily rants about how my life sucks and how the world is out to get me ...................... Priceless

Think of the back-end info this gives them

[jshare]

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

Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them

[Scarblac]

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.

What's the name?

[Amit J. Patel]

Bloogle? Gooblogs?

Re:What's the name?

[nexex]

well, theres already froogle :)

yes and...think data mining

[djupedal]

And all the trends they can presumedly spot and all the private emails they can nab as part of all the drivel...I mean data. Gotta be painful having to wade thru all that whining. This isn't fb. My point is to agree with the parent that the back end is the driver.

Anyone thinking this is so google can be a better neighbor isn't paying attention.

Your blogs belong to google. Hand 'em over.

Buying and selling the wisdom of the masses

[mateub]

Google seems to be establishing a pattern with this purchase.

They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.

The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.

This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.

Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...

adeu,
Mateu

Why I am puzzled

[Voelspriet]

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.

Re:Why I am puzzled

[hoggy]

Should Google crawl every possible weblog constantly? Most of the popular blogs have in common that they update at least once a day or more. Google crawls those sites already more then once a day without problems, catching Zeitgeist.

I think it's when they update rather than how often that's exciting. When big events happen, people tend to comment on it immediately. Crawling once a day can't catch the moment.

But Google has a big relevancy filter, PageRanking.

But this is calculated on a very infrequent basis (comparatively). If I searched for Google and Pyra, I wouldn't find this announcement because it may not get crawled and page ranked for a month. Whereas people were commenting on it in blogs within minutes.

Your remarks make me think though. Google could use Pyra's Blogger for a dedicated search engine like Daypop, but with faster updates and perhaps better filters (although the PR in combination with keyword density and other factors does a good job). Those results can also be integrated in the normal engine.

But I'm wondering if they do this at once, or wait till Blogger has more then active 200.000 users. What do you think?

I think you can already see what I find most exciting about the combination of Google and Blogger ;-)

Time is a powerful dimension that traditional crawlers can only map in a very course-grained way. Via the back-end of a large blogging engine, you can watch memes move in realtime.

Read what "Google Village" says

[rpiquepa]

Elwyn Jenkins, who is behind Google Village or Googlology Info Site wrote a comment about this story minutes after we both discovered Dan Gillmor's article. His comments are available at Google Buys Pyra: Fuel for The Blogging World!. Here are my comments about his story. "I agree with you, it's all about content. But there's a business aspect too. Larry and Sergey might run the technical show. But Eric Schmidt is here to take care of the business. And how Google will make money? By hosting bloggers for a fee? There were not so many paying customers for BlogSpot. And even imagine one million subscribers for $40 a year. That would not bring a great stream of revenue to Google. They must have an hidden idea."