This is perhaps the most audacious thing Google has done but it seems they have bought the financial comparison site Beatthatquote.com for £37.7m
Update: within 24 hours of the acquisition beatthatquote.com no longer ranks on Google when you search for “beatthatquote”. Still no announcement from Google on the matter.
BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.
Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.
We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.
I have no idea how Google can hope to get this past regulators. This is going to cause a lot of controversy.
Good news of course for the company involved!
If Google was going to do a product search style comparison engine they might cut out the middlemen and aggregate deals directly from big financial institutions. However with this move they are buying one of the middlemen sites. Perhaps Beatthatquote.com had some good software and Google wanted that? Will be interesting to see how finance & insurance price comparison sites like Go Compare and Money Supermarket fare over the next couple of years once Google does something in this space.
My personal opinion is that Google should steer well clear of doing things like this. If they want to build their own services such as shopping or financial comparisons I can understand but surely any site they own has to be removed from the index in a sector like this?
The system behind Demand Media is an automated topic suggestion tool which finds keywords & topics and compares them to metrics such as search volume, competitiveness and likely profitability of running ads on the pages. Topics that reach a certain threshold of profitability are queued in the system and writers choose and publish content accordingly.
In view of the negative view Google has of content farms it might surprise you to hear that Google has applied for a patent doing much the same thing. Google has been working killing content farms for over 12 months and it’s worth revisiting a patent released in Feb 2010 now that we have seen the initial effects of the Panda algorithm.
The patent basically covers a system for identifying search queries which have low quality content and then asking either publishers or the people searching for that topic to create some better content themselves. The system takes into account the volume of searches when looking at the quality of the content so for bigger keywords the content would need to be better in order for Google to not need to suggest somebody else writes something.
There are loads of potential ways Google could implement this sort of system:
Sell story ideas to publishers
Work with highly trusted partners to get them to write content that Google knows will be good
Give the data away in their keyword research tool
Create an aggregation system similar to how reviews are pulled into Google Places to show links to related content
Have wiki style user contributions sections to search results
Rather than explain all this myself, below are some key quotes and diagrams from the patent, I’ve highlighted the important bits.
Last week Google announced a major update which affects around 11.8% of all search queries on Google.com. The update was intended to reduce rankings for low-quality sites commonly known as content farms.
As yet the update has yet to hit the UK however as most of the larger content farm type sites are US based it’s probably not going to have as big an impact over here.
Whilst this update is affecting 11.8% of all queries it’s not actually affecting very many sites. The algorithm is being applied at a domain level rather than a specific page level and the sites affected are so large that even a few hundred sites suffering could cause 11.8% of all queries to be altered.
I will come to our conclusions about how this algorithm works later on but first we need to understand why Google would need an extra algorithm to combat these type of sites. Traditionally Google would use a combination of link data and on-site optimisation to judge rankings but for content farms this is impossible for a number of reasons. Read more →
Following on from the JC Penney storyGoogle has penalised another of Americas largest ecommerce sites, Overstock.com for apparently offering .edu sites a 10% discount if they placed a link on their pages.
Apparently Google was responding to a complaint from a competitor last week. Google contacted Overstock to explain the problem. A thread has been running on WMW for over a month about this and full details are here.
The first link of this sort I found was here which immediately raises the question of what Google intends to do about the other 1104 links on that page? Certainly if you have a link on a page like this it’s time to start worrying. Read more →
Google appears to be testing a new type of rich snippet today derived from a combination of the sites telephone number and the “alt” or “title” attribute of the sites logo.
An example of this is shown in the screenshot below, you can see how Superbreak has managed to make use of this to get a very nice snippet for quite a few different keywords including “theatre breaks“. It’s not clear whether they have done this intentionally however I can’t find any other sites exhibiting the same behaviour.
A very interesting story broke this weekend involving JC Penney (a big US retailer with 1000+ stores and $17.8 billion in revenue) and the New York Times. The retailer was basically outed for apparently using TNX to set up thousands of links on very low quality “spam” sites.
It seems that the campaign worked so well the site was ranking for pretty much everything, until the NY Times outed it and the site was moved down to 60th or worse for all the queries after Matt Cutts got involved. Search Engine Land and TechCrunch also covered the story very well. Read more →
For those of you that haven’t heard of the company they are a content farm using outsourced writers to produce 5000 articles per day on sites such as eHow and various other informational resources.
On January 25th Demand Media sold 8.9 million shares at $17 each in an initial public offering. The following day, the price rose 35 percent to $22.61, which would give the company a market capitalisation of $1.9 billion, greater than New York Times value of $1.5 billion.
The company has never made a profit since 2006 despite revenues of $198.4m in 2009. Read more →
Google has added a new method of refining certain search results – “Top References”.
This seems to be a very limited bucket test at the moment as we were not able to replicate it on any further searches. We will update the posts if/when we can get some better screenshots!
The functionality seems to be that the filter allows you to search through all the existing search results for “roses” to show “Pages mentioning” the reference used to refine the search.
The interesting part of this feature is that unlike other filters the original search query in the search box doesn’t change.
Update: Rob Hammond has provided another screenshot of this in action below:
Google has made a couple of interesting announcements today about how social media signals and “customer experience” affect rankings in the main organic search results.
The social media signals information was revealed in an interview with Danny Sullivan.
To paraphrase, Google looks at the number of people tweeting a link as well as the authority of the people doing the tweeting. Links that get lots of tweets from authoritative people are given a boost. This has long been speculated and we’ve seen the effects pretty dramatically on our (award winning) twitition.com site which has around 10,000 links per day being tweeted and gets a load of Google organic traffic. Read more →
When I broke the news that Google was showing full page previews in the search results most people thought it was an interesting test. I doubt many of the 25,000 people who read that post actually thought it would become a real feature.
Today Google has announced that previews will be rolling out across 40 countries in the next few days. Read more →
