As usual, Google watchers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to Google’s intersection with traditional media. Google announced the launch of Google Co-op, which clearly has one strategic purpose — destroy the opportunity that magazines and other niche media believe they have to compete with Google by creating vertical searches.
This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging.
While no one doubts the power of the big search engines, there is increasing frustration about the inexact nature of results they deliver especially for specialist media sites. Enter Vertical Search, which might be better than Google.
See now what Google is really trying to co-op(t)?