Are you sure this is not about the facebook 'like' concept? Facebook has brought the 'like' keyword into the mainstream, and the 'like' concept is creating a graph over the entire web that is basically sorting the web by how many people actively like the pages.<p>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'.<p>Additionally, it gains all the search knowledge and skills of the people behind the like.com website.<p>This facebook social graph thing with 'liking' websites may be important.
For a company with $50M in revenue and $50M raised in venture funding, $100M is not a very big acquisition. It is interesting that despite the big revenue figures, it is never mentioned if Like.com is <i>profitable</i> - so we can only assume that it isn't and this acquisition is another asset sale.<p>Google offered them $30-40M before they launched in '05. They should have taken that.<p>Back then Munjal (the CEO) was writing an interesting blog about starting Riya - worth reading the old posts: <a href="http://munjal.typepad.com/" rel="nofollow">http://munjal.typepad.com/</a>
<i>If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.</i><p>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.
I am certain something is brewing inside Google behind the purchase of like.com<p>They also invested in the company called <a href="http://www.pixazza.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.pixazza.com</a> which is doing something on the same lines. Basically trying to monetize the images on web.<p>Maybe Google is planning to incorporate the various bits and pieces of facial or image recognition in order to monetize it.
With such technologies, it'd be fun to see a face recognition pattern which finds people with similar faces on facebook :)<p>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.<p>As to why google would buy like.com, no idea!
To compete with Bing's visual search, perhaps? <a href="http://www.bing.com/visualsearch" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/visualsearch</a><p>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.
So Android will have a new feature. You take a picture of a restaurant or something else and then see search results for that object. Including reviews, prices in other shops.