There's no question about it: Google is aiming to become an all-purpose Web portal that tries to keep people on its pages for as long as possible. This is a definite departure from the company's
original goal, which was to get people off its Google search engine as quickly as possible. The Associated Press says the company's new finance site is the last piece of the puzzle: Google now offers
free e-mail, news, photo sharing, instant messaging, shopping, mapping services, online classifieds and a new finance site. But analysts aren't convinced the company's push toward online omnipresence
is so wise. Search guru Danny Sullivan, for one, worries that Google is focused on just about everything but its search engine these days, from which the company earns 99 percent of its revenues. On
its Web site, Google claims that 70 percent of its time and resources are still devoted to Web search, versus 20 percent for its other products and 10 percent to new experiments. Now you know why most
of their services are still in beta. To be successful in its multichannel approach, says Forrester analyst Charlene Li, Google needs to concern themselves most with building and maintaining user
loyalty with its new services. With its new finance site, Google's challenge is to surpass Yahoo Finance's 31.4 million unique users per month, who spend an average of 54 minutes per visit. Sullivan
worries that Google's over-rapid expansion could ultimately cripple the company; he warns that the same fate befell AltaVista in the late nineties.
Read the whole story at Associated Press »
