Google Acquires Like.com
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Perhaps google sees that this approach is basically like their page-rank, but more exclusive and less spammable. Since this 'like' concept was quickly understood by people on facebook, owning the key 'like' domain means that google is poised to exploit the understanding of 'like'.
Additionally, it gains all the search knowledge and skills of the people behind the like.com website.
This facebook social graph thing with 'liking' websites may be important.
If facebook's "like" was to replace PageRank they would have to have buttons on a whole lot more pages (Google said a while back they consider one trillion URLs in their index). Especially sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist -- which seem unlikely to ever use facebook widgets.
Do you ever think "liking" could realistically replace Google's crawler approach?
"liking" is inherently biased. It is in no way an objective measurement of usefulness. Pages that contain negative content will never be "liked" even though they might be very useful or linked to a lot.
As an extreme example, say a mass-murderer becomes very famous. No one (except for a trolling few) will "like" a page giving information about him, like on wikipedia. But this page would be a lot more interesting than a sensationalist article describing him as the second and third coming of Satan, which would be "liked" a lot more, without really being more valuable.
Google offered them $30-40M before they launched in '05. They should have taken that.
Back then Munjal (the CEO) was writing an interesting blog about starting Riya - worth reading the old posts: http://munjal.typepad.com/
Google has 23 billion a year in revenue, substantially all of it from two products. Operating an internal competitor to Product #1 will not move the needle. Its, quite literally, less likely to make them less money than changing the shade of blue they use.
Alternatively get rid of the competition so they can't surprise you by succeeding. If they succeed to much they might just turn down your offers to buy them later and suddenly you've got to play catch-up.
They also invested in the company called http://www.pixazza.com which is doing something on the same lines. Basically trying to monetize the images on web.
Maybe Google is planning to incorporate the various bits and pieces of facial or image recognition in order to monetize it.
I remember some experiment where they merged hundreds of photos of people from the same country and you could see the emerging patterns of big heads, big noses countries, etc. Fascinating.
As to why google would buy like.com, no idea!
Also, the domain is a nice bonus. The future of search lies in recommendation and personalization, and Google will eventually want to build a brand to compete with Facebook in that space.