I can make this fairly simple. 10 years ago who would have thought that a search engine could be a huge business capable of competing with Microsoft? Now here we are and MS is old hat and Google ... which for all the fanfare etc... is really just a simple homepage with a blank you can use for a query. It just happened to be that their search algorithm produced better results than competitors and so more people went there.
Of course their business was based on words and then later images which of course are worth 1,000 words. I have to say, I've used the image search lately almost more than the text search. Anyway, long story short Google got into video searches as well. The only problem is that videos are worth 100,000's if not millions or billions of words. Just as Google unseated Yahoo! amongst others in the text search department YouTube was about the unseat Google in the next wave of information searches ... video.
In the long term 1.6 billion is a small price to pay for a service which could possibly have unseated Google down the line in the information business. 5 years ago I don't think anyone thought a search engine really had a shot at Microsoft, today Google is right there ... 6 months ago MySpace was all the rage and still is for social networking. However, as far as searching information goes, YouTube shot up really quick and was the video searching site of choice. Making Google video seem ... 'eh'.
At the very least Google might be able to turn a bit of a profit with good pay for content and advertising. At the most they stopped a growing beast from devouring them in the extremely volitile Internet business.
Of course their business was based on words and then later images which of course are worth 1,000 words. I have to say, I've used the image search lately almost more than the text search. Anyway, long story short Google got into video searches as well. The only problem is that videos are worth 100,000's if not millions or billions of words. Just as Google unseated Yahoo! amongst others in the text search department YouTube was about the unseat Google in the next wave of information searches ... video.
In the long term 1.6 billion is a small price to pay for a service which could possibly have unseated Google down the line in the information business. 5 years ago I don't think anyone thought a search engine really had a shot at Microsoft, today Google is right there ... 6 months ago MySpace was all the rage and still is for social networking. However, as far as searching information goes, YouTube shot up really quick and was the video searching site of choice. Making Google video seem ... 'eh'.
At the very least Google might be able to turn a bit of a profit with good pay for content and advertising. At the most they stopped a growing beast from devouring them in the extremely volitile Internet business.