Search for Gold
One of the most underrated assets in Internet companies is their search databases. Most consumer companies value their customer data as priceless, but ignore the dynamic, yet valuable records of what their customers are looking for. It's pure marketing gold. Verisign has DNS records, Google has raw searches and Amazon has book searches. Often what people were looking for and didn't get, is more valuable than what they found.
This information is usually not exploited, but could be. It is, of course a privacy nightmare, but a marketing dream. The IP ownership is usually ambiguous or nonexistent so whoever possesses the information can do pretty much what they want with it.
I also expect the government to start glomming onto these records for security reasons. That's when we'll have the legal experts weighing in on ownership.
Posted on January 19, 2006
