Google’s “PR-Caching” Strategy

Public opinion on Google’s PR is torn. On the one hand, they can be tone-deaf—witness public reactions to Google Street View or their former CEO’s statements about privacy. (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”) On the other hand, they’re widely reputed to be as idealistic as they pretend to be. That does great things for their public perception. We’re willing to treat them as a nerdier version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

But there’s a third version of Google’s PR machine: Google seems to delight in making product improvements or technical advances that they only reveal when it makes someone else look bad. The best example was when Google announced that they’d indexed a trillion URLs just two days before competitor Cuil launched with their 120 billion-page index. There’s an argument to be made that Cuil never recovered from that blow.

Google trotted out their embarrassing product launch timing today when they announced faster +1 buttons a few hours after SEO blogs started posting concerns about whether or not +1 buttons hurt rankings.

For anyone competing with or reacting to Google, the lesson is pretty simple: Google doesn’t launch the minute they have a workable product. Sometimes they launch when it’s ready, but more often they launch when it’s strategic. And for them, the best time to launch is when it cripples the competition—they have the largest market share in a large and important market, so their top priority is squelching competitors. In Cuil’s case, it’s likely that the launch (and the “we’ve indexed more of the web than Google!” pitch) had been leaked to Google. In the case of the +1 buttons, Google reacted, and fast.

A more benign explanation is that Google makes announcements like this when interest is at its peak, so of course their announcements will coincide with other peoples’. Unless you’re Google, that difference is semantic.