Epinions is Toast Why does this concern Epinions? Epinions deals mostly with rating and
reviewing products, which Froogle doesn't touch...yet. But another new toy
from Google Labs does:
WebQuotes. WebQuotes annotates
your search with quotes (and links) from other websites. Imagine WebQuotes
matched with a product search feature, and you can see why Epinions might
be in trouble.
Epinions can fight back against irrelevance by attempting to become the
prime source for quotations. But I still think people will click through
from Google.
So. I will make my first tech-pundit prediction: Epinions is Toast.
Some of my reasoning in this piece is inspired by Paul Ford's fictional
story August 2009: How Google
beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.
I'd like to make a prediction: Epinions is
toast. Google is going after the price-comparison market with their
"Froogle" shopping search engine tool
(incidentally, PriceWatch and DealTime ought to watch out, too). I think
it's clear that they'll be posting the most relevant Froogle results on
the main search page soon, like they do for Google News.
Posted at 16:26
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