Does Google benefit from faulty search?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on February 24

I just got off the phone with Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of Publicis Groupe Media (and now head of its new-born digital consultancy, Denuo). He maintains that Google is out to become the eBay of advertising, but with one crucial difference: “EBay makes the market but doesn’t take sales,” he says. “Google is the seller and the market. Eventually, someone has to wake up and say, ‘This is [BS]’.”

Tobaccowala also maintains that Google benefits from imprecise searches. His point: If your searches delivered the Web page you were looking for, the adjacent advertising wouldn’t be nearly as tempting.

Tobaccowala was in a London restaurant talking to me, on his way to Bombay later this afternoon. He had plenty of Google on his mind. One other assertion. Given that “anything that has a high margin gets competition,” he says, “the ‘do-no-evil’ people can protect their market only by creating a monopoly.”

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/