Et Tu, AOL?
On December 21, 2005, AOL signed and closed a deal to acquire video search startup Truveo Inc. The exact financial figures of the deal were not revealed, but AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said it was the largest since their $435 million cash acquisition of Advertising.com in 2004.
Truveo’s seven employees will now be a part of AOL’s video and search team. They will remain at Truveo’s offices in Burlingame, California.
Truveo launched its video search services in September and currently has approximately 1.8 million video assets in its index. Its unique technology is called “Visual Crawling,” which “automatically discovers video files and related information on complex” sites, AOL said in a statement. This technology will allow users to look for and index sports, entertainment, and breaking news clips from various sites in a more efficient manner than was previously possible.
Search engines typically utilize software that crawls the Web and examines HTML coding behind Web pages, and then checks any links that are found. Video sites present a slight problem with this means of searching because they present their content in a way that crawlers cannot see.
Truveo claims to get around this issue by downloading and viewing the entire page just as a normal visitor would. It would view all the scripts, plug-ins, and other tools that a traditional search crawler would otherwise overlook, according to Truveo’s chief executive and founder Tim Tuttle.
This process would also give search engines more data and information to describe the video, which would make searches more appropriate and precise.
AOL plans to integrate Truveo with its own video search products available, including Singingfish, a Seattle-based company that Time Warner purchased in November 2003. All said and done, AOL will have a one-stop video search engine with about 4 million videos in its index.
Last month, AOL and Google announced a much-talked-about partnership worth $1 billion. It gave Google a 5% stake in AOL, and was supposed to integrate AOL’s offerings in Google’s Video Search and Store service, which was unveiled last week and will allow CBS and the NBA to sell clips through their service.
It would appear, then, that AOL’s acquisition of Truveo pits their video search service directly against Google’s new service. Now, instead of having to share their content with Google, or having to let Google sell videos for them, AOL will be able to promote and sell its own archive of indexed videos. Indications seemed to convey that Google wanted to solidify its relationship with Time Warner in order to have easy access to its large archive of media offerings, but that possibility seems to be gone. It would appear that AOL took Google’s $1 billion, used it to improve its own business, and have no intentions of sharing any of the media that Google had its eye on. As The Motley Fool put it, “Thanks for the money, and by the way, we’re upgrading our own video search.”
One of the main points in the press release concerning the partnership between AOL and Google was that Google would be “Collaborating in video search and showcasing AOL’s premium video service within Google Video.” It remains to be seen whether this meant that AOL would share all of its content with Google, or if it only meant that they would share whatever is left over after they improved their own offerings.
So, did AOL betray Google? Did they take their $1 billion and run? Was that their intention from day 1 of the partnership talks? Regardless of the answer to these questions, AOL and Google are now just as much partners as they are competitors.
Nelson Mandela once said, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” If Google trusted in this maxim before, they probably don’t anymore.
Sources:
http://google.blognewschannel.com/
index.php/archives/2006/01/11/google
-vs-aol/
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/
provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=
AP&Date=20060110&ID=5404930
http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_
interactive/article_display.jsp
?vnu_content_id=1001808945
