Google goes blogging

The news that Google is acquir­ing Pyra Labs has got­ten a lot of peo­ple won­der­ing about the move.

I gen­er­ally dis­agree with Anil’s con­tention that it’s not a great fit. I believe there are many areas in which Google and Pyra are complementary.

My per­sonal sus­pi­cion is that Google is look­ing at sites like Day­pop, Popdex, and Blogdex and real­iz­ing that those sites, rely­ing on the power of tens of thou­sands of edi­tors, are work­ing as well if not bet­ter than the news search engine Google has cre­ated. By buy­ing Pyra Labs, Google can enhance its PageR­ank algo­rithms with some level of human interaction.

Going beyond the basic advan­tage in the search area, Google also is gain­ing a good tool to add to the Google Box and allow it entry in the over­all cor­po­rate con­tent man­age­ment world. Why would any­one buy a box if it has search soft­ware only? How about if it has a full intranet solu­tion on it?

While the acqui­si­tion does offer some level of cen­tral­iza­tion, I doubt it’s the only rea­son Google is doing it.