StepForth SEO Manager Jim Hedger discusses his thoughts on a potential IPO at Google with Sally Hardcastle of the BBC World News.
Listen to this BBC interview (in MP3 format)
Here is the interview transcribed:
StepForth’s BBC Interview
Sally Hardcastle (SH) asks what Jim Hedger (JH) thinks of Google’s potential public offering:
JH: “I think the Google IPO is the most watched game in town right now. I don’t think they will be going for it until late next year, it would make sense for Google to issue an IPO, they certainly need to beef up their warchest to fight off MSN and Yahoo!, and we know that MSN is investing about 50 million dollars this year alone in their search feature. Google is the #1 search engine in the world and search is, this year, a 2 billion dollar a year industry and is projected to be a 7 billion dollar a year industry within the next 5 years. So, there is a number of companies that want a share of Google’s action.”
SH: “What kind of share does Google have of the market?”
JH: “Either through someone entering www.google.com or through Google’s distribution to other search engines about 76% of all search traffic goes through the search database.”
SH: “Why has it been so successful?”
JH: “Mostly because it is concentrated on focusing on relevant results with a very clean interface,”
SH: “Don’t use the jargon; they just keep it simple and it works.”
JH: “Yes and that is very appealing to search engine users.”
SH: “Now you are saying that others are batting down the door, but the others don’t have this simple way of doing things. Can they change their act? I wouldn’t have thought they could.”
JH: “Oh I think they are trying to change their act, MSN specifically is trying to introduce a new search engine probably within the Spring of 2004, thats going to be very simple, stripped down, much like Google.”
SH: “So is 2003 a pretty crucial year for this business? Which I should say is obviously an important business nowadays.”
JH: “Yes, 2003 has been the year of big changes. I guess the business end of search engines has dominated in 2003, with mergers, acquisitions, and all of the companies, including Google trying to grow as big as possible quickly, to fend of their rivals. But 2004 is going to be radically different; I think we are going to see a number of the smaller players either absorbed by the big three or simply put out of business.”
– Ross Dunn