Google is no longer the GUARDIAN
Google has given up its willingness to be GUARDIAN of your information, at least in terms of one cutsy form of marketing.
Google's (lease) deal with WordDial to forward that company's domain property, 48273426.com, to resolve to a google wap search of the word "Guardian" is no longer. (48273426 spells Guardian on your phone keypad.) What was the reasoning for this marketing strategy? As we wrote in early July - 'they now have your credit card information - thanks to Google Checkout - on file in addition to everything else one could possible imagine. They certainly want to maintain your confidence in their security protocols.' So, it appears Google Inc. wanted its brand name to be synonymous with the word 'Guardian,' and thus security. They also were hoping to get people interested in the idea - like they tried but failed in 2001 - of using numbers to facilitate internet search.
The problem with the strategy: no one seems to realize that numbers and mobile search are indeed a match made in heaven. The blame for that could be the companies themselves: no company currently feels that it is 'pretty' to advertise a number to be associated with their brand name. For now, cosmetics wins over practicality. However, the top internet search companies know that one day numbers will prevail only because tens of millions of mobile searchers will want to press less keys to get to where they're going. Evidence of this fact is that a sizeable fraction (6-7) of the top 30 U.S. domains - by traffic, per Alexa - can be reached by their domain numbers. Yet there is nary an advertisement, article, etc... to illustrate this fact.
Has Google given up on the prospect of ever actually applying Google Number Search technology? Many domain speculators don't think so. There is a good chance that the domain property 466453.com will one day get more hits than Google.com. Even WordDial thinks so - it bought 4664538255.com (Google Talk) just last week.
So what happens now when you type in 48273426.com on your wap phone? Now, it is one of the many parking pages in the 1,000,000+ domain portfolio of WordDial (aka Domain Numbers).
Speaking of numbers, although ESPN's mobile service has flopped, its lesser known shortcut to its site, 3776.com, which used to go to an html page, now goes to a wap (wml) page. Still no one has bought 3776.mobi.
posted by self @ 8:01 AM
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