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October 4, 2005

The Toolbar's the Thing

Following up on an earlier post, Battelle has recently noted that this really could be all about Google finding a new venue to increase toolbar downloads. One thing I've trained myself to do (fairly or not) is to always view Google as a business intelligence and data mining company. They sell (or are preparing to sell) marketing information based on the huge amount of data they've collected on people's web surfing habits. Search is merely a vector to collect that data.

I've always found Google's mission statement a bit disingenuous.

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

That's not a profit model. No one pays Google to organize that information for them. A more accurate mission statement might be:

"To show the most targeted ad to the best customer at the perfect time."

Of course, the shelf life of text ad revenue like AdWords and AdSense is probably limited, and Google knows this. I know for a fact that AdSense revenues have plummeted over the past year or so as people gotten used to them. As more people become web-savvy and recognize text ads as advertising, their effectiveness drops off. Fortunately for Google, they're well poised to move into selling marketing data. Perhaps their mission statement should really be:


"To provide the most complete, detailed marketing insights covering the widest range of customer demographics."

As Battelle notes, the Google toolbar is critical to this strategy. Sure, Google can track which of their search results get clicked, but the toolbar allows them to keep tabs on users long after they've left Google's SERPs, monitoring which pages they visit, as well as (supposedly) preferences like bookmarks.

If the partnership with Sun really could lasso "tens of millions" of new toolbar users, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt hopes, then all the stuff about Open Office and thin clients is really besides the point. Google will have already accomplished exactly what it needed to.

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