Reverse Engineering Google Business Strategies

October 15th 2005

What’s in a name? That’s a good question. Some feel that the name that you are given at birth provides and accurate description of who you will turn out to be.

So I began to wonder, does a domain name say as much about a future site as your name says about you? I decided to take a look at some of the domain names registered by Google to see if I could get an idea of what the company may be up to in the future and came up with some interesting ideas which I will share with you here.

Etymology is the study of the history of words. And through etymology you can find out just what your name means. I looked my name up and it means “bright fame.” I guess that’s not too far from the truth :)

In any case, I took some time one day to see if I could track down some of the other domain names Google owns.

It was actually pretty easy when you consider that Google tends to favor one bulk registrar service. So I went to my local WHOIS lookup site that offers domain exploring and did a search for Google surrounded by wildcards to see all the domains that have “google” in them. I came up with almost 8000 results.

So then I started scanning them, looking for the common registrar that I mentioned, and I captured those domains into a text file for later review.

I may have missed a few, but I came up with 22 domains. In this article, I’ll look at a few of the more interesting ones:

google-corp.com

No surprise here – many companies set up a corporate site or portal. Whether Google will use it or not is up for discussion.

google-bank.com

This one was a surprise when I first found it a few weeks ago, but then I heard that Google was looking to hire someone with banking experience. In fact, at Yahoo!s Hotjobs site, there are a couple dozen finance related Google job postings. Speculation is that Google is going after Paypal. I agree, although I think there will be more to it, such as an e-commerce system online businesses can build into their sites. In other words, Google becomes the financial transaction processor for e-tailers.

google-secure.com

I think this one works with the “google-bank” domain – after all they need a secure server to handle the transaction processing.

google-movies.com

google-showtime.com

google-showtimes.com

These three could work together, or separately. The showtimes domains are pretty obvious – Google could index local theaters and offer a centralized place to offer movie listings and times. This would be a direct competitor to AOL’s “moviefone” site which also offers showtimes, reviews and so on.

Google-movies on the other hand could offer much more, including distribution of titles online, either first run releases, or other services such as online rentals. If this were the case, this domain would likely also use google-bank and google-secure for transaction processing.

google-travel.com

Yet another vertical Google could enter which would likely directly compete with the likes of Expedia and Travelocity. A full service travel portal offering airline, hotel, and car rental price comparisons and bookings. Again some form of transaction processing would be required.

google-voip.com

google-wifi.com

google-vpn.com

These domains can support my theory on Google’s purchase of a wireless phone provider, which I recently speculated on in this article. We already know that Google recently launched Google Talk, and they have also launched a beta test of a secure wi-fi service, but as I mentioned in my previous article, I think this is only the beginning. Imagine a secure wi-fi/wireless network spanning the continent which is actually a hybrid system switching to and from a fibre/broadband connection when the wi-fi/wireless is unsecured or non-existent.

google-webanalytics.com

googleanalytic.com

googleanalytics.com

These ones should come as no surprise. Google recently bought Urchin web analytics. My question is when are they going to give Urchin away for free like they do with everything else?

google-domains.com

Again, with Google’s recent domain registrar status this shouldn’t be a surprise. I don’ t know that I see Google getting into the domain registration business, however by registering the domain they are at least protecting their brand in case they do go that route.

And finally, the Ebay killer:

googleauction.com

This makes sense. The company should be able to see the money making potential here. There is nobody else in the online auction market to speak of.

In fact this could be a very lucrative market for Google, after all Ebay said that it earned $291.6 million, for the three months ended in June, a 53 percent increase from $190.4 million at the same time last year. I would think Google would want a share of that billion dollar per year earnings that Ebay now has.

Of course there are many many other Google domains however I thought these were the most interesting.

If you have your own ideas of how Google could or should use these domains, please post your comments below, I’m very interested to hear what others have to say on this subject.

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