Google is more foe than friend

Commentary: Great idea, poor search, still a threat

By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch

Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Jan. 10, 2006 [ Page 1 | 2 ]

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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - On the flight home from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I sat next to a woman who was excited about the possibility of charging people 5 cents to watch one of her home videos of her toddler.

GOOG, , ) new Video Store, which lets anyone with an inkling to share their videos and make money on the side the option to charge viewers to watch their creations for a minimum of 5 cents.

At this juncture, the open-marketplace, name-your-own video business model is a brilliant promotional idea than it is a service. I give Google kudos for the business model actually. Google Video appeals to the bottoms-up, user-generated, people-power mindset, and it puts traditional content owners, like CBS, at ease by giving them the power to choose how they want to monetize their videos.

Yet Google`s move to encourage amateurs and small production houses to create media and get paid for it clearly makes Google far more of a competitor to traditional media than, other new distributors of digital content, like Apple. (This was a prediction of mine last year. See Internet predictions for 2006.)

Now, fortunately, for big media, there`s still time to improve their own networks so that they won`t need Google for distribution. That`s because Google Video, despite all the hoopla, has a lot of challenges.

For instance, Google`s search technology behind the video service fails to live up to Google`s high search standards for text.

Type in the words ``CES`` and the first video is totally unrelated as it`s a nine-second video of a guitar player. The only relevant video was the sixth one shown, and it was essentially a video press release.

By comparison, type in ``CES`` in Truveo.com, a startup with 12 engineers focusing on nothing but perfecting video search, and the first one is a very relevant video clip, dated Sunday, Jan. 8, of a CNN report on the tech fest. In fact, Truveo had a minimum of 100 relevant videos related to the consumer show.

For those Google lovers, who are crossing their fingers and clicking their ruby slippers hoping the search giant`s shares top $500, you may say that Google Video is pretty young, so it`s just a matter of time.

But Truveo is younger than Google Video. Truveo launched its site in September 2005.

When Google started getting noticed by the digirati back in 1999, it, too, made significant strides against the leading search companies of the time, Yahoo, Inktomi, Lycos and Excite. Back then, Google had one mission: text search. It did it well and it was the most relevant and appealing, notwithstanding the fact that it had no business model.

See my interview on Truveo

See my interview with Truveo CEO

Today, Google`s video search technology leaves much to be desired, and that`s largely because Google is doing multiple things at once and it`s also increasingly building up a huge base of enemies.

It may be good, but it`s not Apple

That`s not the case with Truveo or Apple, the leading online music store and the only notable video store to date. Apple certainly doesn`t seem to be encouraging people to create their own content that would ultimately make traditional media content irrelevant.

Apple`s already signed on as the distributor of copyrighted content for NBC and Walt Disney. And, it`s only a matter of time before Apple will get CBS on board as well.

Google signed CBS, but it hasn`t struck a deal with other notable content providers, such as Time Warner`s (TWX:

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TWX, , ) AOL, which is a bit surprising since the search engine just spent $1 billion to purchase a 5-percent stake.

To be sure, I suspect Google`s director of video, Jennifer Feikin, will be very deft at getting content owners to sign on Google as a distributor, if only to experiment.

See my interview with Google`s Jennifer Feikin

Continued: Please see Page 2