Are you sure this is not about the facebook 'like' concept? Facebook has brought the 'like' keyword into the mainstream, and the 'like' concept is creating a graph over the entire web that is basically sorting the web by how many people actively like the pages.
Perhaps google sees that this approach is basically like their page-rank, but more exclusive and less spammable. Since this 'like' concept was quickly understood by people on facebook, owning the key 'like' domain means that google is poised to exploit the understanding of 'like'.
Additionally, it gains all the search knowledge and skills of the people behind the like.com website.
This facebook social graph thing with 'liking' websites may be important.
If facebook's "like" was to replace PageRank they would have to have buttons on a whole lot more pages (Google said a while back they consider one trillion URLs in their index). Especially sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist -- which seem unlikely to ever use facebook widgets.
Do you ever think "liking" could realistically replace Google's crawler approach?
"liking" is inherently biased. It is in no way an objective measurement of usefulness. Pages that contain negative content will never be "liked" even though they might be very useful or linked to a lot.
As an extreme example, say a mass-murderer becomes very famous. No one (except for a trolling few) will "like" a page giving information about him, like on wikipedia. But this page would be a lot more interesting than a sensationalist article describing him as the second and third coming of Satan, which would be "liked" a lot more, without really being more valuable.
my guess is it's the domain Like.com plus their particular image search & tagging/semantic work plus possibly talent plus eliminating competitor plus denying it as acquisition by another competitor, plus eyeball stream. okay that's not a specific guess at all!
For a company with $50M in revenue and $50M raised in venture funding, $100M is not a very big acquisition. It is interesting that despite the big revenue figures, it is never mentioned if Like.com is profitable - so we can only assume that it isn't and this acquisition is another asset sale.
Google offered them $30-40M before they launched in '05. They should have taken that.
Back then Munjal (the CEO) was writing an interesting blog about starting Riya - worth reading the old posts: http://munjal.typepad.com/
Any sale of a search engine to Google is an asset/talent sale, right? They're not going to operate a competing search engine brand (aside from that one they do user testing at) -- they're going to assimilate its technological and biological distinctiveness into their own.
Google has 23 billion a year in revenue, substantially all of it from two products. Operating an internal competitor to Product #1 will not move the needle. Its, quite literally, less likely to make them less money than changing the shade of blue they use.
Alternatively get rid of the competition so they can't surprise you by succeeding. If they succeed to much they might just turn down your offers to buy them later and suddenly you've got to play catch-up.
I am certain something is brewing inside Google behind the purchase of like.com
They also invested in the company called http://www.pixazza.com which is doing something on the same lines. Basically trying to monetize the images on web.
Maybe Google is planning to incorporate the various bits and pieces of facial or image recognition in order to monetize it.
With such technologies, it'd be fun to see a face recognition pattern which finds people with similar faces on facebook :)
I remember some experiment where they merged hundreds of photos of people from the same country and you could see the emerging patterns of big heads, big noses countries, etc. Fascinating.
Also, the domain is a nice bonus. The future of search lies in recommendation and personalization, and Google will eventually want to build a brand to compete with Facebook in that space.
So Android will have a new feature. You take a picture of a restaurant or something else and then see search results for that object. Including reviews, prices in other shops.
Perhaps google sees that this approach is basically like their page-rank, but more exclusive and less spammable. Since this 'like' concept was quickly understood by people on facebook, owning the key 'like' domain means that google is poised to exploit the understanding of 'like'.
Additionally, it gains all the search knowledge and skills of the people behind the like.com website.
This facebook social graph thing with 'liking' websites may be important.