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Top 10 Biggest Google Acquisitions

Saturday, April 5, 2014 8:13

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(Before It's News)

Google is a multinational corporation with some expensive tastes. News broke out recently that the search engine behemoth acquired navigational app Waze for a mind-blowing $1.3 billion. Even with Google’s spend-happy acquisition history, this purchase is not one of its costly ones. Here are ten acquisitions that are more expensive than Waze. The numbers are not surprising given that the corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world and to process over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day.

10: Like.com visual search, $100 million+

Google bought this visual search company in 2010, and put the experts to work to build a search vertical for women’s fashion called Boutiques.com. Like.com continues to operate as a separate entity from Google operations. Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch described Like.com as “the next evolution of comparison-shopping engines, such as Google’s Froogle, eBay’s Shopping.com, EW Scripps’ Shopzilla or Become.com and the next evolution in image search offered by the portals and search engines.

9: Applied Semantics, $102 million

Experts may think Android is Google’s greatest acquisition, but from a pure ROI consideration it’s hard to beat the Applied Semantics acquisition, which built AdSense — the paid search advertising platform that’s responsible for most of Google’s revenue and profits today. Just look at the ads on this site, they are all part of the Google Adsense program. The acquisition gave Google new traffic for its paid listings and new strengths in the world of advertising space. It also significantly hurt one of Google’s competitors — Overture. Applied Semantics was one of Overture’s top 10 partners, generating traffic for Overture’s paid listings through one of its programs.

8: dMarc automated radio ad placement, $102 million
It was a move that was supposed to permit Google to expand its AdWords platform into the radio medium. However, the buy turned out to be nothing but a failure and the worst decision Google has ever made. In 2006, the search engine giant paid $102 million for this platform for automatic placement of radio ads, and offered a whopping guarantee of up to $1.1 billion. But the business was never successful, and Google had to shut the program down in 2009. But Google Adsense is still good.

7: On2 video compression, $133 million

Google tried to buy this video compression company for $106 million, but its shareholders held out for a higher price and eventually got $133 million in January 2010. Last summer, Google announced it would open-source the VP8 video codec it acquired with On2, and rename it WebM. Google has since tried to push WebM as a replacement for H.264, a much more widely used standard for Web video.

6: Slide social gaming, $228 million (estimated)

Google bought this social gaming company in August of 2010 for $228 million. Slide still operates but Slide founder Max Levchin has reportedly been working on another secret new social initiatives -now determined to be Google +. Great minds think alike, if you ask me.