How Bill Gross’ GoTo.com inspired the AdWords business model
slate.com
slate.com
The nuances in this article that the Googlers claim were fundamental inferiorities of GoTo I think are negligible as they would have just had to tweak their bidding system and it would have been comparable to Google's.
Does anyone know what percentage Yahoo got of Google from the patent licensing deal in 2004?
As part of the settlement, Overture will dismiss its
patent lawsuit against us and has granted us a fully-
paid, perpetual license to the patent that was the
subject of the lawsuit and several related patent
applications held by Overture. The parties also mutually
released any claims against each other concerning the
warrant dispute. In connection with the settlement of
these two disputes, we issued to Yahoo 2,700,000 shares
of Class A common stock."
-- The times have changed.
But there are some shades of Google leaning back that way, with "monitor-yellow" backgrounds, closing access to retail product search indexing, etc
Everyone gets a free listing but if you want (typically) additional headings and (definitely) a big or bigger display ad you pay.
As a result if you are a general contractor that does kitchens and bathrooms and also sells plumbing fixtures as well you would have to spend the money to be listed in ads in all those categories.
Without having to spend money it ends up being confusing for consumers because it's like craigslist and inevitably results in people not being able to find what they want.
The "advertising funded" is actually a benefit not a detriment.
[1] I used the yellow pages to build a business from scratch that I actually sold. At the time I started I had no employees and there were established competitors (that didn't advertise) that did the exact same thing. The advertising is what made the business pretty much (in addition to price, quality service and all of that).
Note that this benefit disappears online, because of targeting. If you see an ad in print, you know the company had enough money to put that ad in front of thousands of people. If you see an ad online, it might have been targeted precisely to you, so the company might well be a scam. I wonder if there's a business idea in making online advertising into a more costly/believable signal.
Without having to spend money it ends up being confusing for consumers because it's like craigslist and inevitably results in people not being able to find what they want.
So Google without ads, when it first started, was worse than other search engines? Nope. The advertiser that bids the highest might not be the best option for the user at all
I have a lot of respect for Bill Gross and all his various IdeaLab ventures. But it strikes me that how a story is told affects your viewpoint.
I would probably still say the patents would have hurt the public more than they would have helped.
At the very least it would have provided more incentive for google to buy goto rather than develop a competitor (regardless of even the validity of the patent because of essentially fud.)