Google and Axel Springer: Traffic Means Power
November 6, 2014
In the summer of 2014, Axel Springer acquired 20 percent of the Pertimm-powered Qwant. As you may know, which I profile in my current Information Today article, is a Web search engine with features. Believe me, lots of features. What Qwant does not have is traffic. Google’s Eric Schmidt believes the quirky system is a threat. From my lookout on top of the crest of the hill near the hollow in which I live in rural Kentucky, that strikes me as a very rotten red herring.
Axel Springer now understands the difference between the traffic generated by Qwanta and other Web search engines and the Google if I understand “German Publishing Giant Axel Springer Caves in over Google News Snippets Row.” The article reports:
Announcing the free license for Google yesterday, Axel Springer said that traffic to the sites had declined by nearly 40 percent since Google stopped producing snippets and thumbnails on October 23. It also claimed that traffic to the German sites from Google News was down by almost 80 percent.
You can work through the “real” journalistic approach to this point when you read the original article.
What’s important to me is that Google traffic flows are a powerful tool in Google’s negotiating arsenal. Even if you own a search engine, if you are not in Google, you don’t exist. I wonder how Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl would view this fact.
Stephen E Arnold, November 6, 2014
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