Google Acquires YouTube for $1.65bn

I read this over on Scoble’s blog, and he linked to the press release here, and I’m really not sure what to make of it. Google is a damn good search engine/advertising company, and I like it a lot for the work it’s done in searching. I think I’m opposed to the whole Google office thing, partly because I don’t like the idea of having my work stored centrally (ideal on a smaller scale, for multi-site businesses with a WAN), but having software stored centrally as well doesn’t make sense to me. What is wrong with local applications accessing a (locally) central store of data? If you want centralisation, use thin clients and possibly blade PCs. Then there’s the privacy issues. Google is renowned for it’s usage policies, GMail being the most publicised. Talking of which, GMail is wonderful, but should Google have created it, I’m not so sure. YouTube could obviously do with some advanced searching technology, that no doubt Google will provide, but should it be transmuting itself into a “web technology company”. I would prefer Google to remain focused on searching, and offer it’s technology to a whole range of other applications created by others. Obviously advertising has always been google’s main source of income, and I hope it remains that way, but surely they could make more money from developing really innovative search algorithms, Maybe I’m just reluctant to change, but Google is a search company, YouTube is a video repository. If only they could have kept it that way, and integrated google into YouTube.

Technorati Tags: Google – YouTube

Search Engines and Me

Following on from my previous post, I decided it would be interesting to see how I ranked on various other searches on a selection of search engines