A Google of solutions

The world’s most successful search engine provides a host of ideas for developing the Arab world’s tenuous presence on the internet | Business Today Egypt

You have likely heard of Google, the popular search engine, and run a search query over the website for news about your favorite actor or for the names of new job applicants to know a little bit more about them than they included in their resumés. 

But you might not know that the company, founded in 1998, finally made an IPO on NASDAQ last August, and is now worth roughly $55 billion larger than the market capitalization of General Motors and Ford combined. How is this possible if people just click their way through the website without paying a penny?


Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page figured out earlier and more fundamentally than anybody else that with the snowballing growth of the Web content, it would become increasingly less convenient for a user to get to what they want on the web, and that the engine that could catalogue and sort this vast field would be poised to be hugely profitable in the future. 

Hoping to command this position, they crafted what was then the best search software using a now-common ‘page-rank’ algorithm, in which the number of other pages linking to a web page decides the ‘value’ of each page listed. The page with the most links is likeliest to be the page the user wants, and is thus listed at the top of the search results.

Their assumption proved correct beyond their wildest dreams. People not only logged in to their religiously plain, graphic-free website when they wanted to ‘google’ (i.e search for) a keyword of some subject, droves even made the search engine their homepage a useful start to research, gaming or shopping. 

The next step was to design a model for capitalizing on this popularity without putting premium on the search service itself. So Brin and Page, along with newly hired CEO Eric Schmidt, came up with the idea of selling “keywords”; they figured businesses would pay top dollar to be listed at the top when a user searches for a particular keyword, and the AdWord program was born in 2000. 

Each keyword has since been auctioned to the highest bidder. Nokia and Motorola, for example, would have been eager to pay whatever it took to buy the keyword ‘cellphone’ (Google calls these ads ‘sponsored links’). The sponsored link practice is now common among other giant search engines like Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN.

The success of this scheme has evidently helped revive confidence in online advertising. This can be attributed to two factors. First, the ads became more relevant. Users now see sponsored links that are relevant to their search, not ads of women perfumes brands or horror movies. Second, advertisers are only required to pay for the number of times their links have been clicked through, not for the number of times their ads were viewed on any given page.

In 2003, the Google guys came up with another creative advertising approach they called “AdSense,” in which Google inserts text advertisements, with links, on other websites that are relevant to the content a user is viewing. For instance, if you are perusing a story about Tom Cruise on the New York Times’ website, you will probably find accompanying text-ad links by Google to a website announcing the actor’s new film, or even to a gossip website tempting you to log on to know about Cruise’s latest girlfriend! Virtually every website, or even personal homepage, can participate in the program on the condition that they attract a certain amount of browsing traffic every day. 

The beauty of the AdSense text ads is that they are not exactly the ads as we know them nagging, distracting and generally unwanted. As these ads are designed to be relevant, they are rather integrative to the content you are viewing, and do in fact enrich it. If you were browsing a website on how to fix your old printer and saw a text link to a company that fixes or buys old printers, that would be a helping hand. In this scheme, AdSense takes the money from the advertiser (here the company that buys old printers) and shares it with the content provider (the website that gives advice on printers) and percentages are undisclosed. AdSense is increasingly becoming the reason many text-content providers don’t put a premium on their content.

Now comes the hard question: Why don’t the Egyptian websites benefit from these creative online advertising schemes? The answer revolves around some or all of the following reasons. First, as far as I know, there’s no single Arabic-based search engine out there on the Web, and thus no prospects of revenues like those from an AdWord-like program. Second, very few Egyptian content-provider websites participate in Google’s AdSense. Content-rich websites, like BusinessTodayEgypt.com or the online version of Al-Ahram Weekly, for instance, could get a new source of revenue through having text-ad links from Google fitted neatly onto their Web pages. 

Finally, very few Arab advertisers have come to grips with how or to what extent contextual ads could help them, and thus have not bought Google’s service. This obviously limits the revenue opportunities of websites that provide Arabic content. Ultimately, this is also a reason for the deterioration of the quality of that content.

Online advertising is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the marketing industry. We need to consider it more seriously both as a much-needed financial boost to aid the Arab world’s disjointed approach to the net and as a necessary tool for staying competitive worldwide.
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