How does GoogleMaps and Live Search Maps make money?

[darren.wlsn1]

Originally Posted by rstoyguy

My vote is for advertising. That and googlemaps parent company is google.com, and livesearch.com is Micro$oft. Lots of money in them two parent companies...

big +1, thats where its at.

[zero157h7]

Yeah it is not so much the advertising that you see on the device as it is they want to saturate your mind with services from their company and get you hooked on all of their services, and I must say google is doing a fine job of this on me. I would not use google search for a long time because it seemed to be the popular thing to do and I have a strong counter culture side to me, but one day I tried it and after doing it a few times and Yahoo's search not giving me results that I liked as much as google, I changed.

Then I changed to gmail for unlimited inbox and now I use calendar, contacts, and every other service they offer.

(I hear yahoo's search has gotten better.)

[Kamokazi]

Originally Posted by zero157h7

I would not use google search for a long time because it seemed to be the popular thing to do

Haha, when I started using Google the opposite was true...I used Google because it was this new thing no one had heard about yet, and everyone was using Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, Alta Vista, etc.

That, and the results were infinitely better. Searching used to be a process of hitting up a couple search engines first, Yahoo was the best, putting the most relevant results up top, but more obscure topics wouldnt not yield anything useful..so then you would try a couple others like Lycos or Excite, and if those were still giving you trouble, you went to Alta Vista, which gave you EVERYTHING but somtimes took 10+ pages to find what you wanted.

But anyway, to the topic, it is all about saturating you with their services...they do probably get *some* money from results on your mobile, but they bank on you coming back to their desktop counterparts and really raking in the ad revenue for them there.

[Sulten]

How do they make money?

Live Search = Microsoft Enough said on that one Bill Gates is a Billionaire just from Microsoft so he doesnt need money he can take it as a loss on tax time

Google =

In a nutshell: advertising revenue. Both on Google's site and on other sites. Google is a major player in the online advertising industry. Every time you search Google, you'll see ads displayed along with your results. Those ads are never "mixed in" with the results - there is no "pay to play" on Google... which is one of the reasons Google became the most popular search engine in the first place. But the sponsored text-link ads above and to the right of the results generate a great deal of money for Google. These ads are known as "Google Adwords." Those who wish to advertise via Google can learn more on there advertise page

In addition, you may have noticed columns or boxes containing similar text-link ads on other websites - such as this one - which say "Ads by Google" at the top. Google already had a powerful system for selling and displaying ads in association with their own search engine. From there, it wasn't much of a jump to start displaying ads on other websites

[bryn987]

Originally Posted by darren.wlsn1

big +1, thats where its at.

agreed. They want everyone hooked on their services which will lead to advertising revenue.

Just think, a Touch HD using Android with seamless push gmail, google maps, youtube/flash support, google docs, google instant message etc etc, they will grab a ton of market share that will be using their search full of ads