Loogle

It’s fascinating to see how much attention the acquisition of Like.com by Google received from mainstream press. From the intial whispers at TechCrunch and then quickly followed by CSEStrategies, the news traveled along the usual paths until beginning to emerge through Fortune, and finally peaking on CNN’s homepage. What’s the big deal? Google buys companies like I buy potato chips.

The big buzz centered around Like.com’s impressive image reading technology. Like has pioneered this effort for years, and with their last round of $32M in funding, they were able to build impressive amounts of traffic. To build their business case outside of raw traffic and image search technology, Like also came up with creative strategies around CPC and modified ROI incentivized programs. It seemed like Like was the most likely candidate to break through to the upper esceletion of shopping engines until the Google purchase. The main question is, what happens next?

The obvious answer is that Google covets the image technology that Like developed and is looking to fold this into their technological arsenal. Based on Google’s ambitions at differentiation from Bing, they will likely seek to roll this image technology out to several platforms including perhaps Google Maps for additional location identification, beefed up image search technology for image only results, and possibly even using this as an additional piece of their natural algorithms to better rank pages. From a retailing stand point, it seems like a simple step to bring the image search feature to Google Product Search. Google has put enormous of energy into making Product Search into a premier retail destination and the image functionality could be an important differentiator in the same ways Like was using. The only part is, that the image search feature helped Like, but it wasn’t a game breaker.

So what of Like.com?

I’ve seen mixed signals, and it may be safe to say that no one knows for sure. If this were Vegas, 4 to 1 odds Like.com goes away and is absorbed into Google. When your homepage calls out that you have been acquired, and you scale back your traffic buying, the Magic 8 Ball says that signs to point Like going away. Of course, the 8 ball has been wrong before…

September 1st, 2010