The most troubling aspect of Google these days is the shift from passively indexing the work of others (Google crawler) to deliver relevant ads and search results, to owning the data itself and granting access (G+, Zagat, ITA).
Doesn't strike me as an apples-apples comparison. Some data is not free. The web is decentralized and anyone can request a URL and maybe get a response. Not all data sources are like this. ITA doesn't own the airline data -- it receives feeds of it from the airlines. That data costs a lot of money. I would also imagine that Zagat reviews cost money to create and aggregate.
Let's think about it. Instead of buying Zagat, Google could propose a distributed protocol (or microformat/schema for HTML) to publish a review and then they could just wait for it to catch on and then crawl that. But that is not going to help users today. Plus they've already scraped reviews from other sites and that just caused those sites (Yelp) to become very upset that their reviews are being shown on Google place pages (despite the fact they could always robot-out Places specifically).
Encouraging high-quality content on the web is not out of vogue at Google -- this would be silly because the #1 reason people still use Google is to find content on the web. However, it's not surprising to me that given the option to improve Google local quality today they would make an acquisition like this. If you were in Marrisa Mayer's position, what decision would you make?
The problem is Google is now too big and too much of a lawsuit target to get away with aggregating other people's data any more. Web Search is the ultimate aggregation of other people's content, and it's a good thing it's already invented because it would never get off the ground today. Crawling other people's content? Lawsuit. Linking? Lawsuit. Cache? Lawsuit. Allowing searches on trademarked terms? Lawsuit. Snippets in the result page? So many lawsuits! Using user click/query data for Suggest and/or ranking? Outcry in the EU. FTC launches investigations; DOJ sues. Congress steps in; Google forced to back down.
I completely agree. For most of the life of google they have claimed that they are NOT a content company. It's a conflict of interest when a search engine has their own content to push.
How is it a conflict of interest? When a company that was founded on the idea of an algorithm that delivers the best content for a search instead starts displaying their own properties (youtube, maps, reviews etc)... well that's a portal now, not a search engine. Conflict.
I don't understand how it's a conflict of interest. OK, they now create content in addition to searching other people's content. The goal of Google is to "organize the world's information", not to be an independent source of search results. They are a company who gets money when you use their website. Producing content for your visitors is not a "conflict of interest", because Google has never claimed to be acting in any interest other than making money.
The only interest that would conflict with Google's is one that made people stop using their website.
Google’s problem, at this point, is that a lot of the “others” being “passively” indexed are spammers trying to game its algorithms. Google would be foolish not to leverage its money and its brand recognition to find ways to work around this problem with curated data. A link from a page with a trusted author is worth a hundred or more links from pages that are just randomly found by a crawler.
(Disclaimer: I work for Nokia, which competes with Google on geographic search.)
I used to think this was troubling as well, as I assumed that it would mean new businesses would have trouble competing. But based on the poor results of initiatives like Google One-box (music), I don't find it troubling anymore.
Other than the ability for others to compete, is there another reason you find this troubling?
I think it's because the content creators have not been completely OK with Google using their content (see News, Books, etc). Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to do that you need access to it.
