Doubletake on DoubleClick

01/06/2007

Some of the views on this subject may come as no surprise. Several members of our team, such as Search Planner Owen Jones picked up on the acquisitions of DoubleClick and aQuantive by Google and Microsoft respectively; sending waves through many online publications, Owen noted that several sources cited that the two companies would officially be able to integrate media and advertising.

With Microsoft being able to use aQuantive's offerings such as Avenue A/Razorfish, MSN now has much better access to insights into cross channel information, to perhaps offer advertisers better results overall. And with Google's recent foray into online display advertising, what better way to familiarise themselves with how it works than to acquire one of the leaders and innovators in this sector? However, some members of the team were not quite ready to agree it was a done deal, with rumours floating around that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick is not yet set in stone.

But it wasn't all about acquisitions; there was also criticism of one of Google's latest offerings, "StreetView" which in some instances is a bit rehashed. Jos Smyth from the natural search team brought up Google's release of the "streetside" view in their maps offering, who felt that this was similar to what Virtual Earth from MSN tried to do, and what A9 (Amazon's previous attempt at a search engine) did in 2005 to the point where you could see pedestrians quite clearly. And just like in 2005, people are complaining about privacy issues - the lack of them. With Google covering more of an area than A9 did in some cities, and with a more continual view (you can actually drive down roads and, if you get the controls right, can look left and right!)

Still, Jos was a bit more positive about Google's recent purchase of FeedBurner, allowing Google a route into the monetisation of RSS feeds, which he says "would tie-in neatly with their Google personalised homepage". Google's official announcement of this acquisition is available at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/adding-more-flare.html

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