Google Acquisitions

An hour ago for no particularly good reason I found myself flipping through Google's S-1 and reminiscing about the good ol' days six months ago (ha!) when Google was worth less than Disney. (As of closing today, Disney at 25.12/share is worth $51.6 billion, and Google at 193.30/share is worth $52.4 billion. But I digress...)

Flipping through the S-1, I found myself wondering how many companies has Google bought?  A random walk of John Battelle's Searchblog and SearchEngineWatch didn't reveal a complete list, and the purchase list from SearchingOnTheWeb has a comparison of the acquisitions made by Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo/Overture that is interesting but at least a year out of date.

Google's S-1 claims that from February 2001 through February 2003 there were four acquisitions -- though in my slacker-search of the Internet, for the life of me I can only find three (Deja, Outride, and Pyra) -- with aggregate then-value of $133,800 in stock. (Value of those shares now that GOOG is worth $52.4 billion? Priceless!)

Since February 2003, I was able to find seven more acquisitions (Applied Semantics, Kaltix, Sprinks, Ignite Logic, Neotonic, Picasa, and Keyhole) and one investment (Baidu).

Here's the summary. I tried to keep my remarks to a minimum, for some definition of the word "tried"...

Google Acquisitions

2/2001: Deja (the Usenet archive, not the company)

9/2001: Outride (the assets)

between: some unnamed company? (according to the S-1)

2/2003: Pyra Labs (it's not puzzling, say Wired and SlashDot, because Blogger is awesome!)

4/2003: Neotonic Software (thanks, Doug Mehus, for pointing out the CRM nature of this acquisition)

4/2003: Applied Semantics (then-$102.4m, including $41.5m in cash... oingo!)

5/2003: Iceland (ok, not really... :)

9/2003: Kaltix (mmmmm... speedy... RIP PageRank...)

10/2003: Sprinks (it is believed that Pyra, Kaltix, and Sprinks were acquired for a then-total of $15.3m, including $1.5m in cash)

10/2003: Genius Labs (bless you, Biz Stone! :)

4/2004: Ignite Logic (thanks, Oliver)

6/2004: Baidu (not an acquisition per se, but $10m invested, as one of seven investors; it's in China and there are no operational ties)

7/2004: Picasa (PR)

10/2004: Keyhole (PR)

...

perhaps: Monster, Doubleclick, AOL, Disney (it is conjectured)

2014: EPIC

eventually: Microsoft (although "There are a lot of liabilities in acquiring Microsoft." :)

...

Update, October 29, 2004. Another look at the ten acquisitions to date -- the assets of Deja and Outride, plus Pyra, Applied Semantics, Kaltix, Sprinks, Ignite Logic, Neotonic, Picasa, and Keyhole -- reveals a common theme: these are all small, creative, engineering-driven teams with no-bullshit cultures and interesting products and/or innovative technologies.  A key challenge going forward is... can Google absorb bigger companies that contribute revenues, instead of just innovative products that make the company be seen as the Keeper Of Cool Things (so more people are willing to buy ads and/or display ads).

Comments

[Adam]

This is beautiful, from Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Nate Elliott, an analyst for JupiterResearch, a technology research firm, said Google is too unpredictable for him to know.

The company's additions this year -- from satellite map images to digital photo management to e-mail -- have followed no logical pattern, he said.

"They plunge into any area they feel like plunging into," Elliott said. "There never seems to be any rhyme or reason."

Who needs rhyme or reason when you have cash up the yin yang?

What comes next is likely something EPIC... (Thanks, Robin Sloan, John Battelle, mefi and technorati!)

Or, what comes next might just be a better crawler, thanks to this ZDNet link to Tim Bray:

If I were asked to coin a brief description of [Google's] crawling strategy, it would be: Brute force.

Build a better mousetrap, and Google will buy...

[Oliver Thylmann]

You can add Ignite Logic to the list.

http://blog.thylmann.net/2004/05/mighty_google_w.html

[Adam]

Thanks, Oliver. Done.

Adds Nick,

Google, just what is it that you want to be?

The answer, of course, is: we don't know.

Perhaps Marissa Mayer, who oversees the search site and all of Google's consumer web products, knows.

Let's see what we can ascertain from Marissa Mayer talking to the press over the past month. (Does she have them on speeddial?? :)

Choice Marissa Mayer quote #1:

"It's hard to argue that we have dropped the ball on any of the major services we have released. They just move at different paces... There is more creativity involved in our process here... And isn't that more fun and more interesting? We respond not only to competitive pressures but also to internal ideas."

Choice Marissa Mayer quote #2:

"[Orkut and Friendster have] similar capabilities and similar limitations... [but Google has been] blown away [by the success of Orkut only 12 months after it was introduced. Google still earns no revenues on Orkut, Ms. Mayer said.]"

Choice Marissa Mayer quote #3:

"With a company like Google that's growing this fast, the verbal history can't be passed along fast enough... Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened."

And let's not forget this beauty from Marissa Mayer's public appearance last month:

"The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the Founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface."

So much to say, so little time... ;)

[Wally]

Its a really interesting and eye opening artical. Does anyone knows how much google has paid for all these acquisitions? ...

[jimmy amrtin]

Hi,

I have sent out a limited amount of emails to a select few people, that I
have either dealt with personally or learned from, Please take a moment
to take a look at a forum site that I have put up in reference to the
ownership of the domain name "googletalk.com",

http://www.eheap.com/


and please post your thoughts on the matter,
if you choose, for or against......thank you.

jimmy martin
apopka,fla
386-566-7700

[Adam]

Wikipedia now has a Google acquisitions page.