Will Google start cheating on buttermilk pancake recipes? Media companies are more worried than Woody Allen looking for mold on his blueberries.
It seems that if you type "buttermilk pancakes" into Google, one of the top few results takes you to Knol, Google's user-generated content site, which not only gives pancake recipes -- with blueberries! -- but lots of other articles from people who consider themselves experts.
The real experts, with professional recipes, are worried.
Martha Stewart's buttermilk pancake recipe appears lower in the page ranking than the amateur knol recipe. It's cause for concern.
“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Pancake recipes are content. Content is media. Therefore, the thinking goes, Google is breaking its promise not to become a media company, thus competing with the sites its search engine links to.
“Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case,” said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo...
The warnings are dire. Calcanis warns that Google is getting into conflict-of-interest territory on a par with those that led Microsoft into Justice Dept. territory.
And David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, agrees. The concluding sentence in the article:
“A lot of the issues that we saw play out between Microsoft and its ecosystem in the 1990s will play out again between Google and its ecosystem,” [Yoffee] said.
I don't think Time-Warner should be worried yet.
The biggest concern is that Google "might" start giving preference to its own content when doing searches. It "could" start driving other content companies out of business. Of course, no one has seen any evidence of that yet, but hey, Microsoft did it.
Look, Google is not a traditional media company, which means producing copyrighted material for profitable distribution. Yes, you can place Google ads next to your recipe, but many choose not to (the pancake recipe doesn't.) Those ads are likely to take you to recipes from martha Stewart and others.
The Times does note that some sites, like WebMD, embrace Knol by posting their own articles, thus increasing awareness. It's free advertising. Others, like Martha Stewart Living, do not, refusing to help out a competitors.
That reminds me of the late 1980s, when software companies refused to write applications for Windows because they would be helping Microsoft, which had become an apps competitor. The result was that Microsoft took over the apps business, because it had the only software that would run on Windows.
Google doesn't like copyrights. It decided long ago that part of collecting and corganizing all the world's info means getting more of that info online. It does that through Google Books and YouTube. But when it comes to creating new content, Google is strictly amateur. Free info, few copyrights, you decide whether to trust it or not. Google specifically tries very hard to convince folks that it does not own the content. It's just a bulletin board.
If media companies can't deal with that, what are they getting paid for?