Market Research - Understanding the future customer
Description
The perfect search engine should understand its customer and provide him with information relevant to his cause. But how can a search engine understand its customer? Google tries to accomplish this by gathering as much information as possible about its customers and adapting to them by providing usefull applications
Enablers
Online Stores
More and more people are buying products in non-physical stores. Nowadays consumers use the Internet to compare competitors products and do not go to physical stores that often anymore. The more information that can be obtained from future customers, the easier it will be to provide them with relevant information.
Online marketing
When marketeers have information about their target group, they can adjust their marketing strategies to suit their potential customers. Better (online) marketing strategies will lead to higher sales while Google can obtain incentives for providing information
Inhibitors
Privacy Issues
Although information about e.g. searches are being stored and analyzed, consumers do not like to have personal information (name, address, credit information etc) laying around on the Internet. Privacy will become even a hotter item then it is now because boundaries between online and "offline" will diminish.
Paradigms
To understand your customer for marketing purposes, you need information about their shopping habits, hobbies, interests, etc. With Google being the #1 most used search engine in the world, they will be one of the first to have this information available. This will give Google the edge on determing their future strategies based on information from the past. Services based on information (AC Nielsen) already is booming market and Google could decide to sell his information (most used key words)to third-parties. Besides selling the information, Google could also use this information for Online Marketing purposes; advertisements on websites that customers are willing to view and as second step willing to pay money for it. If we look at a service that they are providing, e.g Adsense, Google gives incentives for websites that have incorporated them into their pages. At first hand this looks nice and very profitable for website owners but there is a driving force that propells this new type of "pay per ad click". Google's technology can examine which information is on the website and put its ads in a more meaniful context triggering visitors. By adding the adsense, your website will also be analyzed and based on the hits on an ad, Google knows if the ads worked out well and feedback can be given back. By this Google is learning and I personally think they will use this information in the future for selling or/and more effective online marketing
Web Resources
AdSense Help Centre
Google AdSense
Taiming the Beast - Adsense Strategy