IndustryThe Google Portal

The Google Portal

Last week’s
launch of
Google Finance
revived the entire “Is Google A Portal” question. I
previously wrote in my article on how I saw Google Finance as being closer to
Google’s search mission than some other products it has launched. Still,
Google’s got plenty of other things that firmly put them into the “stealth
portal” or “Portal 2.0” category for me. But does it matter if Google’s a
portal? One reader recently asked me this. Maybe not; maybe so, especially given
their own denials. Below, a further look at that, plus some related commentary
around the web.

Let’s start off with revisiting what a portal is. That was a tricky question
even back in the days when everyone wanted to be a portal, kind of like people
trying to say what’s a Web 2.0 site today. Seriously. When portals were hot,
everyone ran around saying they were a portal regardless of whatever set of
features they offered. It’s very similar to how everyone calls themselves Web
2.0 today without there being agreement of what
what is Web 2.0.

To me, a portal is a highly trafficked site that offers a core set of
features designed to allow a general audience to either start their day at the
portal or return to it once if not often during their internet day. Ironically,
portals can be both “sticky,” in trying to keep users coming back to them, as
well as living up to where they get their names, portals through which you flow
to other sites.

Search is a core feature of a portal. If you don’t offer robust search, you
aren’t a portal, in my books. Other features, including search, I’d say include:

  • Search
  • Email
  • Personalized Home Page
  • Instant Messaging / Chat
  • Free Home Pages / Blogs
  • Communities / Club Areas / Discussion Lists
  • Stock Portfolios

I’m not just making this list up because it conveniently itemizes things
Google now has, as a way of proving my point that Google’s a portal. These are a
set of features that evolved in the late 1990s for portals. If you’re a Search
Engine Watch member,
see my archived

Portal Features Chart
from 1998 which illustrates this for the major players
back then.

Here’s some more background on the history of portals as they related to
search engines, for those trying to rub Web 2.0 dust from their eyes and
remember what portals were all about:

For even more background, see

Portal Features
category of
Search Topics
and older portal articles archived

here
. Again, these resources are for our Search Engine Watch

members.

So let’s say I’ve semi-convinced you that my list above defines a portal.
Does Google have all these features? Absolutely. Search is a given as one of its
portal features. Here’s a rundown on other features, with how I commented about
their portal natures when they came out:

Blogger
Acquired Feburary 2003
From my story,
Google Buys
Blogging Company – But Why?

In the
1990s, it was “home pages” that were touted as the easy way for anyone to get
a presence on the web. Today, weblogs make it even easier for people to
express themselves and share information, plus they are largely seen as more
sophisticated than having a “home page.”

The
comparison to home page-hosting services is critical. When search engines
transformed themselves into portals in the late 1990s, offering home page
building services was one of the essential features they all grabbed. Yahoo
probably made the biggest splash when it
bought
GeoCities
in early 1999, and the move was seen as a way to capture users
and keep them associated with Yahoo.

Google has
long said it has no intention of becoming a portal, but so far, it’s hard not
to see the acquisition of Blogger as adding a portal feature in the same way
that Yahoo did when it bought GeoCities. We’ll almost certainly see an
eventual option from the Google home page inviting visitors to create their
own weblogs using Blogger. It will be discrete. It won’t get in the way of
searching at Google. Yet, it will have nothing to do with search, a giant
departure for the company.

Note that I called blogs the sophisticated successors to personal home page
tools. Nevertheless, three years later in Feb. 2006, Google also
launched
a Google Page Creator, a dedicated
personal home page tool.

Gmail
Launched April 2004

From my story,
Google
Launches Gmail, Free Email Service
:

Email, of course, was one of the first “sticky” features that the search
engines of old added when they transformed themselves into portals. Excite
jumpstarted the move, and Yahoo and Lycos quickly followed. Even AltaVista
eventually offered free email in 1998, only to give it up in 2002 when its
attempt to be a portal failed.

Isn’t becoming a portal something Google vowed never to do? Not exactly. As
I reminded recently, Google has never ruled out email or any other feature it
thought it could do well.

“I won’t say we won’t add services, but we wouldn’t put free email on our
site unless we thought we could do a much better job,” Google cofounder Larry
Page told me back in 1999, talking then about Google’s potential future
directions.

That interview is especially telling, as it highlights another reason
Google wanted to avoid adding portal-like features. To keep its portal
partners from viewing it as a threat.

Today, with two of the three major portals gunning for it, rolling out
email is a way for Google to fire back at MSN and Yahoo. Whether that might
also upset Google-partner and major portal AOL remains to be seen.

Google Groups
Relaunched May 2004
From my story,
Google
Groups Adds Mailing Lists & Other Features, Competes With Yahoo Groups

The new free mailing list
feature, while useful and welcomed, seems like another move to add another
sticky portal feature.

Indeed, Yahoo Groups exists
because way back in 1998, they were
created
(and then called Yahoo Clubs) as part of the race to add portal features and
capture users. Mailing list capabilities came as part of Yahoo’s later

acquisition
in 2000 of eGroups for $428 million in stock.

Now as Google’s competitors are
fighting to win users in the current
search
wars
, Google Groups 2, like Gmail and Blogger before it, seems a way for
Google to strike back at the portal features that some (see

Forrester
and

Moreover
) mistakenly assumed it would be weak on or missed buying.

What’s next? I’m betting some
type of financial type of service similar to
Yahoo Finance. Letting people set up
stock portfolios and linking these to information was one of the earliest
sticky portal features around. It’s a big gap at Google, in the way that the
service once had a big
gap in
term news search.

Google has since filled that
news gap, with its 2002

enhancements
making it a more compelling place for newshounds to start
their day — and perhaps pulling some of those people away from
Yahoo News.

Similarly, a financial service
makes competitive sense. It also fits in with Google’s mission. In addition,
once the company goes public, it might want to offer this if only to avoid the
embarrassment of employees seeking financial updates elsewhere such as at
Yahoo or MSN. Currently, both are key providers of data that Google’s largely
unknown stock quote
service
uses.

Google Personalized Home Page
Launched May 2005
From my story,
Google
Launches Personalized Home Page
:

The new personalized home page
service will no doubt make many people scream “Portal!” That’s because despite
the name, it is essentially a “My Google” feature, similar to the My Yahoo, My
MSN and other My Whatever pages that portals created so their users could
access the many features they offer.

Well, Google’s already been a
stealth portal
as I’ve called it for some time, offering standard portal features such as
email, search and the home pages of today, blogs. The new personalized home
page is merely a visible acknowledgement of this.

But the feature is also
welcomed. It makes sense for Google to offer a unified page for many of its
services, and the page does this without impacting the regular Google site nor
getting far away from the general Google feel at all.

Google Talk
Launched August 2005
.
From my story,
New Google
Talk Offers Instant Messaging & Voice Chat
:

The entry sees Google directly
competing against the much more mature clients and established user bases of
competitors Yahoo and MSN, not to mention its own partner AOL. The move also
opens Google up to accusations that it is way off its
mission of
“to organize the world’s information.” Heck, Google Talk doesn’t even feature
a box to let you search for things, as rival products from AOL, MSN and Yahoo
do.

Of course, the failure to
launch an instant messaging product would leave Google at a competitive
disadvantage. In the end, while the company may not like the P word, but a
portal Google effectively is.

Google Finance
Launched March 2006
From my story,
Google
Launches Google Finance

Finance areas are a staple of
portals, one of the first features they all introduced to help attract and
keep searchers. After all, if you’ve established a portfolio with a service,
you’re less likely to depart to someone new.

Google is allowing people to
save a portfolio, a further extension of the stock tracking it already

introduced
for its personal home page service back in May. So this move
definitely gives Google another portal feature to notch on its belt buckle —
and a feature that may help keep searchers sticking with it (though at the
moment, there’s no import portfolio feature to better ensure this).

But Google Finance is not just
a sticky portal feature. Many searches are financial in nature. Offering a
finance area is actually firmly within Google’s core mission of organizing the
world’s information. In fact, not having offered some type of financial search
was something I

wrote
in article for SEW
members as
being a big gap back in 2004:

As you can see, by the time Google Finance rolled around, whether Google was
a portal or not no longer seemed a matter of debate. I felt earlier moves
already made this a self-evident fact.

Still, the popular media revisited the issue.

Google Finance: A Portal Play?
is a recap of notable blog commentators
calling Google out for a portal play.

Google Evolves Into All-Purpose Web Site
from the AP is another look at this
(I’m quoted in that, but my comment on Google Finance being within the search
mission didn’t make it).

The AP article gets into how the Google mission has changed, how things it
promised not to offer such as chat, horoscopes or financial advice were removed
from its philosophy
page
not too long ago (and all of which you now get,
including horoscopes). That
change actually
happened
last August, but the latest portal addition is attracting new
changes.

So is Google a portal from its official view? Back to the AP story, we’re
told:

The company remains committed to guiding its visitors to other Web sites
with useful information. “Our motivation isn’t to provide sticky services.”

Are you kidding me? Or course Google’s offering sticky features! What planet
is this coming from, Google Mars? How
can you say sending people to Gmail each day isn’t sticky? How can you say
offering them their own personalized home page isn’t sticky? Why are you telling
them to personalize it, if you aren’t expecting them to come back often? Geez —
offering good web search is sticky.

Let’s step higher on the Google food chain, say up to CEO Eric Schmidt. He
told John
Battelle back in December:

Battelle: OK, so does that mean Google?s a portal? Because if you think of
it that way, as Terry Semel recently pointed out, it ranks as one of the
smaller ones.

Schmidt: Well, if I can be obnoxious —

Battelle: Please.

Schmidt: You?re using a tired model of looking at corporate behavior.
You?re looking at us based on market share for technologies and ideas that
were invented 10 years ago. A much better way to ask that is to say, Are the
things that we?re doing consistent with the mission of the company? We?re not
in the portal business, we?re in the business of making all the world?s
information accessible and useful.

So Google’s not in the portal business. Got it? Except, with respect Eric,
you are. And by the way, Google Finance is now your eighth most popular service,
Hitwise

says
(though seeing Google America Samoa at 11th does give me pause).

Finally, who gives a darn anyway? So what if Google’s a portal. One of my
readers loves getting portal things from Google. Isn’t it a smart business move
for it to be making?

Sure, I agree. Some of these portal features are smart things to offer.
There’s no reason why Google shouldn’t be a portal and ALSO a good search
engine. My reader and I explore this more in a thread at our Search Engine
Watch Forums,
Who Cares
If Google’s A Portal?
I’ll quote my two main points as to why being a portal
might be bad:

Why care? Two reasons:

1) You’re pretending that you aren’t, and that’s just annoying. Be proud! Say
yes, we are a portal, a portal that doesn’t forget about search and one that
knows we’re stronger in search for our users if we stay closer to them with
portal features. This pseudo “I never had portal relations with those users”
just feels like you think we’re stupid.

2) If they slip on search, even a little bit, they leave themselves open for
accusations they’ve lost focus, that they’ve forgotten their roots.

Those are my two reasons why people might care. They can easily solve the
first. The second really depends on whether they can indeed juggle all the
balls well. Time will tell on that front. There’s a strong argument as I’ve
said that if they don’t go in some of these directions, they might be making
business mistakes that eventually could hurt them on the search front.

Agree, disagree, have comments of your own. Please share in our forum thread,
Who Cares
If Google’s A Portal?

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

whitepaper | Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing

whitepaper | Analytics Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

whitepaper | Digital Marketing The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

whitepaper | Digital Marketing Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y