Down in the Googledom

Posted on August 30, 2006
Filed Under Commercial Trends |

Yesterday had the hallmarks of a down-on-Google day which might be regarded as a sad case of envy or a recognition that the Web waits for no man, woman, company or stellar brand.

A couple of years back the Washington Post wrote that coverage of Google sometimes resembles that of swimmer Michael Phelps (who is he? - the guy who should have won eight golds at the last Olympics but won only four, sadly forgotten).

Over the past two years I’ve acted as a rapporteur on EU workshops three times and a common theme running through two of them was a resentment, expressed in guarded terms, of Google.

For Europeans Google is the brash American culture taking over the high streets of the internet just like MacDonald has done with our diets. That’s why President Chirac of France and Schroeder of Germany (before the public fired him) tried to launch a couple of initiatives to develop European competititors.

Their enthusiasm for the fight was greeted with only lukewarm funding - a Euro 50 million budget at the EU that may evolve into something more impressive in 2007 when a new round of EU R&D funding opens.

If you look at the timescales involved in EU R&D the safest thing you can say is Google will have transformed the web one more time before a serious EU search project gets funded.

And if you look at the problem the other way round you might also say Europe ought to start using its research billions in ways that foster larger objectives - like transforming the way people seek information, quickly.

Which brings me back to Netvibes. Yet again my daily stats show netvibes increasing its influence relative to other search engines or content aggregators. So maybe the guys from Paris knew something we didn’t, all along.

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