Google Book Search Affects ECommerce, Is Your Vertical Next
Posted on October 5th, 2008by Michael Gray in Google
Last night I was looking up some books that were recommended to me, and saw my first Google Book Search in the # 1 SERP [Travel Wise: How to Be Safe, Savvy and Secure Abroad] (screen shot below).
So the question you need to be thinking about is how much is a radical change like this affecting booksellers like Amazon. Then the thing that should scare the living daylights out of you is what happens when Google decides to move into market?
While Google acolytes will be along shortly proselytizing that this is “good for the user”, excuse me if I doubt Google’s altruistic sincerity in the matter. As Google moves more and more into content stewardship with projects like this and Google Knols, IMHO they are waist deep in the sea called conflict on interest.
Again IMHO Google’s arrogance lets them travel down the river of denial guilt free blissfully deluding themselves and others that they are thinking long term and that this will be better for all of us. You may agree and think Google has made the world a better place, unless of course you happen to be in a line of business where Google has decided to compete by giving away your business product/service/information for free …
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October 5th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Mono*cough*poly
October 5th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Now when I click on the link, I see the book snippet is “displayed by permission” and while it is pretty large, if the publisher agreed to that, I don’t see the problem.
October 5th, 2008 at 11:57 am
two quick notes
google book’s results aren’t ranking as well for the book until the whole title is used. if you search for a partial title, google books creeps its way up the rankings and only takes the number one spot when the whole title is used as a query
and as far as competition, google books is sending amazon sales with a link under the heading “buy this book” on the page you get when you click through
October 5th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Why is googles title not all in bold like the others. Strange.
October 6th, 2008 at 4:51 am
The issue I see with this stuff isn’t that Google is selling a service that others offer through their site, it’d be when they start altering the search results to promote their own assets.
If that result comes up in your example because it makes sense to, great - if it is being artificially placed there then I’d consider them to be on a very very slippery slope indeed.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
After buying some books lately that were less than impressive / not as good as described, I now regularly search for stuff on Google Books before buying, as well as on Google search generally, where the right query will get you the whole book for free. Heh, it’s kind of like having the password for Ali Baba’s cave.
Now, after reading, if I feel the author deserves it, I’ll buy the book. And if it couldn’t live up to the hype, well tough shit for selling an average product. “The Influentials,” recommended by no less than Seth Godin, comes to mind as one I would NOT have bought (note: I have lots of respect for Seth, but for someone advocating transparency, a note on how dreary all the stats and studies are would have been nice…).
So, here I am saying that, yes, this is good for users… but not so much for publishers of garbage. But with my latest post title being: “Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Online Shopping,” and having previously written stuff like “Why Google is Broken” and “The Independent Webmaster’s Manifesto,” I don’t think I fall into the typical G fanboy basket ;).
p.s. GBooks lets you set the excerpt, I believe. I enjoyed Perry Marshal’s excerpt and will purchase his book as soon as I am done my current list.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I don’t see a problem with that yet. If it was their own book store site, then there might be issues. But for now, I don’t disagree with what they’re doing and if you search other books, they don’t necessarily bring Google Books up as the first search result, the few I searched actually brought up amazon.com first.
October 14th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
How much authority do you think Google books search has?…anyone run tests and pointed a bunch of links at them?
This could definitely benefit you if you’re an author of a book with a keyword rich title. No one to my knowledge has written a book with the simple title SEO. Just SEO with nothing after it. Now I will. Kidding.
“Google has decided to compete by giving away your business product/service/information for free” Like that damn library! To hell with the public library system!
Michael, why can’t you just embrace the coming Oceania? A bunch of sites in the SERPS that look like separate countries but aren’t. You create AOL’s walled garden without actually having any walls so the end user won’t care. When Youtube, Knol, Google scholar, Google books etc. dominate the SERPs, we’ll have reached our final paradise. The final paradise is to have Google owned properties in the top 5 results for every search.
And I look forward to the day when Seth MacFarlane actually makes a full family guy episode for Youtube. Then when you search for “Family Guy” youtube will be #1 with content that Gooogle created and owns. I’m not quite certain why anyone wouldn’t view this as a utopia.