The day that Google gets in the dating game seems to be upon us, well sort of. Try a Google search for “Asian Dating” — above the natural search results and directly below the paid listings, you will see a “Location” and “Ethnicity” field. The search results seem to be pulling profiles from just a few dating sites. If I am not mistaken, Mark Cuban had a similar service on his search engine a while back. From what I can tell, Google has signed up as an affiliate with all the dating services from which it is pulling profiles from.
I’m in a bit of a hurry but here’s my two cents worth: Google will make a boatload of money but at the expense of watering down their search results. I’m very surprised that they have opted to position this search area directly above their natural search results.
Peace,
-S
Said, I’m not seeing this when I run a search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-12%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=asian+dating&btnG=Search)
Perhaps it is not available everywhere, or they’ve pullled it?
Hi Sam, I think it’s only available in the USA.
Try this link, here: http://www.google.com/base/s2?hl=en&gl=us&a_n0=personals&a_y0=9&a_o0=0&a_v1=20005&sl=on&a_y1=6&a_n1=Location&a_o1=0&a_u1=&a_v2=asian&a_y2=1&a_n2=Ethnicity&a_o2=0&a_u2=&Submit=Go&oi=gb_refinement&ct=more-results
Funny because Markus (POF) is reporting that yahoo is now plugging their online dating site at the top of dating related search results too. He just blogged about this today.
Google has had dating profiles in Google Base for a long time (http://base.google.com/base). My understanding is that anyone can upload items into Google Base (in this case it appears to be dating profiles). Thus, I believe these are not affiliate deals, but merely these companies uploading their profiles to Google Base. But, I must say, it’s the first time I’ve heard of Google making Google Base items directly accessible from the main google.com search results page (usually you had to always to the Google Base page to find them). I don’t see it here now when I do a google.com search so maybe they are just testing it.
Hi Fred, yes you may be right on both counts (testing/not affiliates).
However, check out the url for one of their listed search results coming from LoveAccess.com.
http://www.loveaccess.com/viewmember.htm?userid=daedalus2003&partner=195&keyword=GoogleBase
Unlike the listings coming from the free dating sites, the url from LoveAcess ends with “GoogleBase”.
Anyone have any ideas if this is an affiliate account or not?
Peace,
-S
(Btw, Neal, nice seeing you here =)
google’s hidden private project
see http://devshots.com
Hey Said – thanks. nice blog.
http://www.loveaccess.com/viewmember.htm?userid=daedalus2003&partner=195&keyword=GoogleBase
I guess the question is – how is affiliate #195. Could be just that – a 3rd party affiliate who’s found GBase a good way to generate signups in the short term.
So here’s what I’m wondering – clearly you can get some exposure (limited for now) by feeding your userbase to GBase .. but what’s their long term plan? Like most google products – they make their products off the back of the web community in a way that seems to benefit the community at first but eventually turns out to benefit them much MUCH more (think Ad Words and their smart pricing fiasco). So are we collaborting to crete a beast by cooperating with GBase? Does it benefit us? Or is this going to be something we all regret a year from now? I mean, we’re basically seeding their database and giving them permission to scrape our content when we submit a feed to GBase. So, what’s the fine print here?
keyword=googlebase is just a name/value pair stuffed into the url. Probably put there by the website it links to. Probably NOT put there by any entity owned by Google. In other words, no big deal and certainly not a revelation of a new Google business unit. Come on guys! Get real!