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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

Is there some unwritten rule that Google has to expand into all areas of the web? It's a tall order that they can't possibly fill. (Buzz et all have proven that.)

Why do they need to compete with Groupon? Why don't they just make search kick more ass? (And no I don't mean clutter it up with more knobs/switches and social bullshit. I mean win the war against the SEO gamers.)

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Google's main source of revenue is their advertising business. Groupon figured out how to engage local businesses, many of which have no other online presence, in a form of internet advertising and make a large amount of revenue in the process. Google being the #1 company in internet advertising, they are naturally very interested in what Groupon has achieved.

Any company that has a ton of eyeballs can make a Groupon Clone profitable. It makes complete sense for Google to do this.

#1 Google already has a ton of small business using their products (Google Places). They can easily create "deals".

#2 They have access to a ton of ad inventory (adsense, google.com, maps, gmail, etc) to gain a ton of subscribers easily

Google is going to partly win the war against SEO gamers by integrating "social bullshit."

HBgary's social networking software; might be a counter to that argument. If they use social as a major signal SEO's will start making fake social signs as they did with fake link signals (buy / build them)

Google is afraid Groupon (as with Yelp) will result in local advertisers using Groupon over Google. It's the same reason that Google is concerned with Facebook--advertising.

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