John Battelle's Searchblog

Their acquisitions to date have usually signified first mover advantage, such as Applied Semantics which then gave them a significant head start with Ad Sense vs. Overture’s Content Match.

Personally I’d like them to have a crack at a genealogy search. Imagine the hour’s people will spend tracing their family history. Think of the services that your existing platform / product base could be pushed at connected families worldwide:-

Family group, family email address, family blog, family photo share facility, family domain name, travel, etc, etc

Just a thought, nothing more.

Andy Mckelvey (Monster Worldwide CEO and Owner) won't sell. The man already has more money than all of India so for him it's more than the money.

According to a recent Barron's Online report, he claims to have has too many friends who've sold their business only to feel empty and bored after. He's no spring chicken and is quite content with is Monster of a hobby.

Monster would need a pretty significant bump in price per, somewhere in the range of $15-$20 over their current value. Ain't gonna happen... that is, at least not with Google ;)

Besides, Google's business model doesn't fit with with Monster's. There is however another big internet giant to whom a Monster purchase would makes a lot more sense.... auctions anyone?

DCLK is a company that Google sort of "triumphed over." Many naysayers said "what the heck does Google think they're doing with this AdSense thing?" What they were doing was taking over the world! Or at least another huge part of the online ad world, anyway.

Because DCLK is now a "defeated" entity, it would surprise me if they bought DCLK at this point. Or if they did so it would be considered an afterthought at best. It would be like acquiring Lycos.

Google needs to go big on the local search angle. Just how they will do that is an open question. Probably build in-house and make little, strategic acquisitions. I'm sure Google's culture says that "legacy giants" aren't worth their valuations, so just go out and beat them and leave them in the dust is the philosophy.

It will be interesting.

ASKJ might be costly to acquire, but worth it. Bringing that ad revenue in 100% and getting control of another large search brand makes business sense. Not to mention there's some good technology at Teoma and a "Q&A" type model with Ask Jeeves that is sitting there waiting to flourish if the right company builds it.

I've noted before that Bloglines would be cheap and easy, making a nice complement to Blogger and giving Google News a logical home.

Still plenty of headroom in the aggregator space. And wrangling all that semi-structured data coming out of the blogosphere seems like a Google class problem.

I don't see Google acquiring Monster or DoubleClick. Granted their new currency enables much larger acquisitions, I foresee more of the smaller ones that they have done in the past not so much for technology, brnad or users as much as for people. Google could duplicate Monster from a product, usage and financial aspect in a matter of months. DoubleClick has few, if any, assets. Just a melange of mediocre components that don't work well together.

There's really no reason for Google to make big acquisitions like these. Google's competence is as a product developer of large scale, consumer web-based services.

I'd look for Google to do things in the area of IM, classified ads, craigslist, hosting, openoffice, browsing, my google, etc.

Lets not forget Google has a foot in the enterprise search market, whose market cap in somewhere in the region of 15bn (I could be wrong so go easy, its big – get the point.)

Ok here is tip:

The big G next acquisition will be aimed at the enterprise market, either in search or productivity (e.g. Socialtext) and will be quickly followed or precede by a SME onlinebusiness backup service.

SME product suite:
Search application
Ad sense account
Local listings
Email
Backup
Blog / website

Thoughts John?

I agree with Dennis. Bloglines sounds like a very nice candidate. Another would be furl.net or maybe flickr.com .

Manage Search
Manage eMail
-> Manage RSS (Bloglines)
-> Manage Bookmarks (Furl.net)
-> Manage Pictures (flickr or picasa moved to the web)

Even with the unconventional Google, I still think the next acquisition needs to target explicit revenue growth - they've got a rather large bill to pay to Overture. I agree that Bloglines would be complementary to the product suite – but I’d expect something a bit more strategic – something to get the markets buzzing, although it doesn’t have to be big – it just needs to have the right implications.

Jbat probably knows already, and this is just his teaser post he’ll refer too when he breaks the story.