If I were given the opportunity to be the CEO of Google for one year here is what I would do, how I would do it and why.
The What: I would change the way the world consumes information.
People consume information in today’s world by ‘searching’. Lots and lots of ad dollars are generated as a result of people searching for information. That probably won’t change anytime soon. People want to consume data. I personally use the search engine hundreds of times a day doing searches many of them competive keyword searches, and shopping searches for products I need. But what If I wanted to consume the searches in a different way using RSS. Could I do it? Today I couldnt. If I were CEO of Google. This would all change. Obviously the technology is there to do it. It’s already being done on Google News, and Google Blog Search.
The How: I would enable RSS Feeds for searches on the main Google Search Engine, and Froogle. This would allow power users to consume RSS Feeds in a brand new way. Speeding up my day and my access to important information. Technologically this isn’t a huge change. But its a change that would have some massive effects on our society. RSS Feeds would become mainstream and accepted. More and more users would use the Google Reader, and thus more relevants ads could be displayed within the Google Reader thus increasing ad revenues and allowing Google to further target products, and searches that would be more relevant to me.
Millions and Millions of people use The Google every day. But do they even know about all the other products? Simply educating people by adding RSS Feeds to search would come along way in expanding the RSS User Ratio.
The Why: Empowering RSS Feeds, and Empowering users would create new revenue streams that The Google really hasn’t tapped yet. RSS Feeds have been the next big thing for quite some time. Google owns Search. Now it has to own the other major marketplace and thats how we consume information in the future. Google Reader is by far one of the best RSS Readers. A few simple changes would bring huge revenue, and mainstream acceptance to this simple technology. And keep people on the Google Properties longer every day.
Originally posted on December 21, 2006 @ 1:37 am
Yea but knowing google, they’d make it so all the rss feeds link to their rss feed reader – which is fine, but it raises the moral dilemma of them making money off of everyone else’s content.
You have to be the biggest f’n idiot ever.. heres my comment from digg.
“WTF .. is this guy who wrote this a fricken moron. The whole point of searching is to get instant results. I don’t wanna wait another 15 minutes and wait for the rss feed to update. Or having to go through a large list of search results returned from RSS , as it is now if I don’t clean up my RSS feeds it gets very messy and hard to find stuff.
This guy has to be half retard, or technologically challenged.”
RSS is terrible, we need an entirely new and better thing. Adam Curry claims to be working on a replacement, but I’m not holding my breath. RSS means that:
(1) Every five minutes or so, everybody downloads ever ypodcaster’s rss file to see if it’s changed. Awful transmisison overhead, potentially expensive for podcasters.
(2) WHen a new show is posted, everybody tries to download it at once. Hard on the fine people who provide bandwidth so inexpensively.
– tobias robison
I think that this is actually a pretty good idea. I agree with the previous comments though in saying that adding RSS adds no functionality whatsoever to google, and so it really offers no benefit to them.
It could, however, boost the awareness of RSS. Since google is somewhat pragmatic, I wouldn’t put it past them.
I think that google could add more functionality by adding Keyword functionality to their homepage. That would be both beneficial to google, and to the user.
http://www.nathanrice.org/2006/12/20/google-keyword-a-new-way-to-find/
http://www.nrcharles.com/googlekeyword/
Nathan
http://www.nathanrice.org/
Oh, I just noticed you meantioned froogle.
That actually would be a good place to implement RSS, since it’s one of the places that google actually displays fresh, dynamic content.
I guess I have to take back the part about RSS adding no functionality. It would in the case of froogle.
Nathan
http://www.nathanrice.org/
not sure why anyone would agree to forfeit the revenue stemming from search based ad revenues by defaulting or enabling RSS searches…kinda saying “from now on all candy at a 711 is free”
RSS Searches would not neccesarily force you to lose revenue.
Tobias: We DON’T need entirely new thing.
It would be enough to devise new delta-RSS transfer protocol, that would download only changes.
It may also look better, if big providers could ‘push’ changes immediately to all currently connected clients. Inexpensive if you use UDP…
Michal J. Gajda, you’re wrong. We need a “push notify” system so that large numebrs of computers don’t query every five minutes. And we need a way to stagger downloads better when there’s nwe content. We really need a new system, suc as a way to register computers to receive, as you say: “big providers could ‘push’ changes immediately to all currently connected clients.”
Tobias:
You’re right. It would be much better if get both push-notify and delta-RSS.
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