Posted On 04/14/06
Contributed by Frances

Frankly, I'm getting a little tired with almost all the news of the day in PPC concerning Google's latest move or latest non-move.

However, like the rest of us, I can't escape a fascination with the search monster, where two guys from Stanford are now living the American dream, and haven't (until now) had to sacrifice too many of their initial goals of bringing the world's information to everyone under the vaunted motto of doing no evil.

There's something just quirky enough about that motto and mission to appeal to those of us who wish we could make it big without having to resort to any nasty tactics or step over bodies on our way to the top, and still be able to act like we're in college to boot.

But I digress. I really wanted to talk about one of Google's latest moves - the development of classifieds (Google Base). If you haven't checked it out lately, you should do so. The verticalization (is that really a word? LOL) has begun, with various categories broken out of general search as well as most recent search terms listed.

The best example is real estate right now. If you click on the Housing category in Google Base, you can refine your search based on all kinds of parameters, including number of bedrooms, size, price, number of bathrooms, type of listing, etc. and then narrow it down by location.

Although not yet fully mobilized, this provides someone searching for real estate online a lot of incentive to use Google to narrow down their search instead of going directly to realtors' websites. Again, it's the concept of being able to research your purchase before you begin to seriously enter the market as a probable purchaser.

We know that more and more people are using the Internet to shop, and many of them use it to narrow down their choices or to find the perfect item and then find a local store to buy offline. Google's going to be there to offer you this service, just like other vertical search engines do.

It's just that Google hasn't done this before - will they be able to beat out the verticals at their own game? Given time, I think Google will dominate this market as well, but what it will mean for the search engine's persona as a whole remains to be seen. I don't think it will be too many months before we get an answer to the ramifications for the entire search market of these beginnings of verticalization by Google. Stay tuned.