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Google Makes Peace With Media Companies
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is bringing some of the biggest media companies into its camp and sharing revenue with them, after drawing their ire last year with moves to search video and books, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Google's improved relationships with media and entertainment companies reflects the confidence those companies have gained in online distribution in the past year, amid rapid growth in Americans' consumption of Web video and other Internet content. But just as importantly, it illustrates a coming of age in Google's approach to the owners of content it wants to search.' Google has hired executives from the media world to conduct the negotiations. One of them, David Eun, formerly of Time Warner and NBC, said, 'The biggest challenge is explaining to them we're friend and not foe.'" Just don't use google as a verb. Pretty please?
Part of maintaining the rights to a trademark (Google(tm) for instance...) is that you actively prove that you are defending your mark. For instance, if a competitor created a new search service called um...what's a good name...uh GOOGLER.COM, and they could prove that Google(tm) was not protecting their trademark, then they could attempt to make a legal stake for the name. Google is probably ecstatic that their name has become a verb, however the guys in legal gotta do this, or else people will take advantage of Google's general good will.
eh -- so deal with it, its no biggie.
Of course, there is a law of the internet that states that just after posting something making fun of someone for making an error, you realize that you were also in error.
It's quite easy to find links to download mp3s of songs on Google. It's just that most of the higher ranked pages are lyric and information sites
So do you think this will mean that the only results will be the ones that any particular big media Google partner wants to push that week?
That's the road Alta Vista, Excite and many other now forgotten search engines went down to make a quick buck back in the day. Google stubbornly stuck to providing relevant links for their users.
That's why Google is now raking in the billions, and they are very aware of that. There is no way they are going to throw away their biggest competitive advantage for a few lousy millions. It's not like they're desperate for money, and (see above) even when they were they didn't resort to things like this.
It started with search results placement...
Google doesn't sell search results placement.