Comments on: Irony alert: Google is all about preserving the context of offline content

By: Hudge

Hudge — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:01:02 +0000

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122091328430212195.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news

Washington — The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Google shares tumbled 5.5%, or $24.30, to $419.95 in 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Yahoo shares were up 18 cents to $18.26.

For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:07:17 +0000

Interesting points in the post and I see where you base your position on. But I have a feeling that a context in this case is more of a tool to preserve the atmosphere of doing an original research in a library – since as many people have already noted such a tool will only have a limited user base and that user base will really appreciate this original feeling. As for the context to put ads, I guess Google has enough of that anyway – and the audience this product is targeted at is hardly one to bring significant revenue to Google.

By: Rex Hammock

Rex Hammock — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:13:08 +0000

Good point, Christopher. The feature could prove to be a very enticing time sink.

By: Christopher Herot

Christopher Herot — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:55:14 +0000

I agree that this has almost nothing to do with why I use Google for searching, since newspapers rarely place related articles together, except perhaps for the way the New York Times sometimes runs an analysis piece adjacent to a breaking news article. Much more interesting would be so see the thread of related stories so I could search backwards in time to find out how something got started.

That said it is kind of a cool feature for avoiding real work – like in the days before styrofoam packing material where you could read the newspapers stuff was packed with.