Unified Theory of Google

If someone were to ask you to name the core business of General Motors, chances are you would naturally respond, "automobile manufacturing". If that were your answer, you would be invited to join the 99% who also answered incorrectly. The correct answer is automobile purchase financing through General Motors Approved Credit, (GMAC). In reality, GM makes most of its money from interest payments it earns helping consumers purchase the vehicles it builds. Similarly, if someone were to ask what Google's core business is, the vast majority of respondents would answer, "search engine", smiling the giddy grins of those who know they are right. I've tried this one on my friends, most of which are already used to the torrent of trick questions that seem to stream from my tongue. Though most of them have heard me lecture about Google in public and private, most still get the answer wrong. Google's primary business is advertising, as it makes the bulk of its billion-dollar quarters from advertising revenues. Along with its competitors, Google has been undergoing a remarkable series of changes over the past six months as it adds new features, acquires new technologies and expands its operations. It is no longer a pure search engine company though its search engine is the most popular around the world. Google acknowledged the shift early last summer when CEO Eric Schmidt famously defined Google as a media company. That is an important distinction moving forward towards global domination. Google is a very big business, one that is growing faster and far more powerful than any other business before it. In seven short years, Google has grown from a university dorm room to universal dominance. After nearly five years of being at the top, being in second place is not on the agenda. That puts Google in the interesting position of being among the most watched firms on the planet. Search Engine Optimizers pay attention to all major search engines but we obsess about Google. Recently, the StepForth research team took a long, hard look at Google and made some well-educated assumptions about what we saw. Our findings, though absolutely unscientific have been labeled the Unified Theory of Google, an expansion on the European Football inspired name SERoundTable noticed data from Google Base leaking into the general Google SERPs. We are assuming that including clients in Google Base is going to become increasingly important as Google tests a clustering engine that will produce results drawn from its various search appliances to present them in an info-tree format. Lastly, SEOs need to pay attention to the past as well as the present when planning future website promotions. As Google acquires more information about the histories of documents in its index, and compares those histories against sites linked together, a continuing cascade will show itself in the SERPs. We believe that Google is entering a period where it favours its membership though we are not convinced this was an intended consequence. We are however, convinced that signing our clients up for Google memberships, primarily through Google Analytics and Google Base will be beneficial in the long run as Google works to draw results from its multiple databases. The Unified Theory of Google, (and it is only a theory), suggests to us that as Google grows into itself, it will subtly favour information found within its own databases. We believe this provides a series of indispensable tools along with a basic outline for client campaigns that uses the strengths of Google to propel client sites to the top of the general SERPs. Which is why they came to us in the first place. Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of