Google Vs EBay: A Search Title Fight?

Maybe I'm a little tired, perhaps my brain is just not firing on all 3 cylinders today but it seems to me there might be a storm brewing on the search horizon, and it might be between two giants of apparently non-competing product lines... or are they?

Follow along here, I'm thinking as I type (never good, but often funny...)

Contender #1 - Google, arguably the worlds biggest search engine (in the western world - Baidu.com is apparently #1 in China) makes a large portion of its revenues from monetizing human curiosity: We know this as "search."

People logon to Google.com and type in search phrases for things they want and presto - Google shows them what's on the search menu that day. And no that was not a sideways comment at the ever changing landscape of SEO... although now that you mention it

The Search Heartbeat

No question, Google has its finger on the pulse of search, it knows what people are looking for - you could say it knows what we want. But does it really?

Contender #2 - eBay, another Titan, this time of a different nature. And that's when I began to wonder. People logon to eBay.com and they search too, but this time they are searching for things they want to buy.

It's still search, eBay knows what people want - perhaps even as well as Google... but here's the twist. eBay knows what people want to buy - and let's not forget sell. This information is priceless because frankly knowing a million plus people are looking up academic information is useful, but I'd much rather know what they are spending their money on.

Watch And Learn

It's a cardinal rule in marketing - pay attention to what people are buying (and selling) and you will know their hearts and minds, perhaps their very souls. With eBay you can already uncover hot markets, speciality niches and positive trends. This information is already on their websites.

But imagine the breadth of the data that exists at eBay HQ. Imagine the business intelligence that exists when this morass of buying and selling data is processed, sliced, diced and then reported.