Google Extends Syndication, Adds Site Flavor
Late to this one, life got in the way, but worthy of note nonetheless. Google late last week introduced two new offerings, Google AdSense for Search, and Site-Flavored Google Search. One is a commercial product, the latter a Labs project. Both give new tools to publishers which, through their adoption, extend Google's reach into the web.
Full PR info is in extended entry.
Now, these are interesting products for a couple of reasons. From what I can tell, Site Flavored is the outgrowth of Google's Kaltix acquisition. It allows a webmaster to tailor Google's search results to a site's own tendencies (so my site, for example, would bring search engine results as opposed to headhunters...). It seems a pretty blunt instrument for now (not instantly updated, categories are pretty general) but that will change with time. Site Flavored is yet another way for Google to get you registered into a Google relationship - a key strategic imperative (in fact, once you add site flavored search to your site, the logo 
that Google places on your site links to Google's personalized search page). It's another neat feature that will help get Google's search results distributed across more of the web, and leverages the Google platform in a more robust manner.
Of course Google is already in the web platform biz - they serve AdSense to thousands of sites. Yup, true. And they are extending that with their other product, AdSense for Search. As far as I can tell (and I may get this wrong), this is a way of syndicating AdWords - their in house ad serving tech used on the main search site, and licensed to big partners like BellSouth and AOL - out to the masses. As Danny points out, this has been done before, but abandoned in the dot com bust.
I'll be very interested to see how much uptake these products get.
Peter Adams (CTO Looksmart) weighs in on Site Flavored.
Wired News on the news....
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Comments
this is a natural step for a company in a time when 'vertical search' could take over much of web search traffic. Now, publishers have more of an incentive to drive traffic to google.
For google site flavored search, why do I have to tell them which categories to use? If they have my site spidered, they should be able to TELL ME what my site is about and what my users should be looking for.
Good point, one that Jeremy also made:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002095.html
It might be nice if they could make the search based on the site's link neighborhood, or any of the other auto-categorization methods that have been proposed.
I am hoping that they will still allow users to search outside of the "categories" the publisher decides are relevant. For example, John mentioned here that they would return search engine marketing results on his site instead of headhunter results... Well what if I'm looking for headhunter results?
I just happened to be at this site when I decided to look for them.
this is a natural step for a company in a time when 'vertical search' could take over much of web search traffic. Now, publishers have more of an incentive to drive traffic to google.
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