John Battelle's Searchblog

Im slightly stumped here John after reading your post.
Can you elaborate on your posting your thoughts.
Getting people to install their toolbar is probably priority number 1
I work closely with a few software companies and have had google phoning to see if their toolbar can be included within the software download.

Quinton, I think John's referring to the fact that Google would give the Toolbar promo space on their usually pristine homepage.

Interesting that in the UK, Google gave similar real estate to Blogger. The link is gone this week but while it lasted the impact on traffic was huge!

Ahh right.
Sorry here in the UK we get automatically forwarded to google.co.uk and we cant see the .com
The toolbar ad is not on the UK google.

Just realised there is a link to the .com site from the uk google.
Interesting enough is that the Personalized home page is only available from .com

I'm sure I've seen this before (in the UK). What surprises me most this time round is that I've actually got the toolbar installed and Google hasn't registered that I don't need to see the ad.

There's was a chart in the most recent MarketingSherpa SEM survey that showed global toolbar search growth stalling **for the first time ever** back in March or May of this year, at about 11% of all searches.

They've taken the link down for as of 10:30 Monday. Maybe just a test

My guess is that John points to the importance of the personal details being collected by Google through the AutoFill feature... but I am not sure.

For what it's worth, when the Skype deal went down I wrote a post called 'A different spin on eBay-Skype' that espoused the critical importance of the client application play as a driver in eBay acquiring Skype.

You can literally copy the arguments in that post and apply them to Google.

If interested in such things, here is a link to the post:

http://thenetworkgarden.blogs.com/weblog/2005/09/a_different_spi.html

I've posted in my blog about this phenomenon as well. It’s a bit interesting that they seem so eager to get people to use the toolbar that they announce it on their site, which is disturbing. What’s also interesting is that the Sun distribution deal of Google toolbar happened pretty much at the same time. Could it be that Google is actually pushing for new toolbar users to be able to integrate it with Google purchases (Google wallet)? That would answer many questions.

John is just indicating how much importance they place on it for their future strategy.

Google pushing the toolbar, is the equivilant to Microsoft pushing Internet Explorer or Windows - it creates a platform. The toolbar, no matter what browser, makes you think Google is your gateway to the internet. All you need is Google, and Google will find what you want. Acting as the roadmap and gatemaster of the online world is a powerful position, which I equate with its role with the desktop computer.

The toolbar also ensures Google maintains their lead, as the toolbar makes sure no one has to type "yahoo.com", "msn.com" or "ask.com". Why go to another search engine, if the search box is already there?

Whoops - when I said "which I equate with its role with the desktop computer", I meant Google's efforts online are the equivilant to what Microsoft did with the desktop computer.

Well why didn't he just say that :)
Y!Q Directly underneath too!

All of the commenters have missed the #1 reason that Google wants you to use their toolbar--it allows them to track users' entire web activity. This is an extremely valuable data stream that they cannot obtain easily just from their logs.