Jeff Nolan has already called me out for my Google obsession but I cant really help it given that its a part of my job (search, finding, etc etc) to track google and everyone in the industry as closely as I can Last week’s launch of local shopping on froogle sheds some light on Google’s vertical search strategy. It is actually quite brilliant really. . . and quite obvious too now that I think of it . . .

Google’s biggest asset is no longer its technology, its the traffic that it can generate. Thus, instead of trying to compete with vertical search engines head on with technology by doing the things that vertical search do best (meta tags, application layers etc . . . see the comment section of my previous post . . here) , Google is going to throw its weight around, as well as go back to its roots by remaining an aggregator of aggregators. (or a search engine of search engines)

Froogle’s local shopping product is built on top of other vertical search players/aggregators - Getauto, Stepup, ShopLocal (interestingly owned by the Tribune Co. . . hmm … syndicated classified by Google imminent?), and others. Why bother with trying to create semantics around millions of data sources when other little startups are already doing it for you? Now, google only needs to leverage GoogleBase’s folksonomy based semantic engine/database to aggregate from a few sources. These little players could always block google but given that they need the traffic, they can’t say no (like Craigslist did to Oodle) but will instead feed their content to google through googlebase. And as long as each of the verticals remain fragmented, Google does not face serious threat of re-mediation (think what google did to yahoo or MSFT did to IBM). I wonder which verticals Google will move into (leveraging Googlebase) and how other vertical search/application players will respond. . . fight the power or fall in line?