If Google Buys Digg, Say Hello to ‘Diggle’

Yes, I penned that myself. I figured that if people can come up with merged names like “Brangelina”, “TomKat”, and “MicroHoo”, then why not “Diggle”? But what is “Diggle”? It’s a combination of Google and Digg…

As reported on TechCrunch earlier today, there are reports that the search engine giant will purchase Digg, the brainchild of Kevin Rose, for $200 million. While this will only potentially aggravate those opponents of Google who want to see the #1 search engine go down, it will embolden their search indexing and bookmarking capability.

Most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft, which will be terminated on a sale to Google. Digg has raised $11.3 million in venture capital.

As quoted from Michael Arrington’s article, this great scheme by Google will also become a direct smack in Microsoft’s face as they try and emerge as a serious contender for the search engine market. So far, the big winner of the online acquisition war between major players has been Google. Microsoft scored with Aquantive, but Google took the wind out of the software giant’s sails with YouTube, DoubleClick, and potentially Digg.

So what does it all mean? Well, it means that for marketers, there may be more potential to advertise on other networks. Seeing how most businesses use Google AdWords, will these text ads be displayed prominently on Digg, one of the most popular bookmarking sites on the whole web? What about Digg’s role in SEO and SEM strategies? Will Google now incorporate into their algorithms the “Digg-style” of democracy and allow people to rate which stories they find to be most popular? For example, compared to the TechCrunch article on “Diggle”, since that holds more authority and probably ranks higher than this blog normally…if the general public thought that this blog post gave more useful information than TechCrunch and rated it per Digg’s style, would it appear higher in ranking when queried on Google?

Semantic web searching is also emerging as the next greatest thing that the major search engines want to roll out. So does Digg add to this functionality? Absolutely. It will help Google incorporate the mob mentality and make searches more relevant based on what the user wants to search for. Unfortunately, all we can do now is wait and see what Google’s “potential” purchase of Digg will do for the Internet. If it holds up, I’m imagining that the remaining bookmarking sites will soon be engulfed by Microsoft and/or Yahoo. One thing stands out: Kevin Rose is quite a lucky man…and soon to be an even richer one.

Read the TechCrunch article here on the potential talks going on between Google and Digg.