Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad (Good?) Wolf?

The blogosphere is buzzing about Google’s plans to enter into on-line classifieds and scan every book in the world, copyrighted or not. See Digital Rules By Rich Karlgaard.
Apparently Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, French President Jacques Chirac, and others see Google as both benevolent (they love its search engine) and evil (their publisher constituents are nervous that they might actually have to compete with the brains and capital at Google). CollegeRecruiter.com is impacted both as a publisher of books and as the seller of job postings, a type of on-line classified advertising. Are we nervous about Google’s forays into two of our business areas? Sure. Are we excited about the potential because we see the potential for working with their systems in such a way that we are able to help level the playing field against some of our larger indirect competitors that are able to buy advertising on the Superbowl? Absolutely.

As a publisher, we have no problem with Google scanning our books and making excerpts available to potential buyers. In fact, we requested that they do so. We feel that our books provide excellent value to potential readers and believe that the more potential readers who are exposed to snippets of the content, the more will buy. That’s known as a win-win.
As job board, the more candidates who see our postings on other sites such as Google and then click over to our site to apply to the positions the better as that will increase our traffic, increase the number of resumes in our database, and increase our value proposition to employers. The key is that we’re a niche site. We’re not Monster or Careerbuilder or HotJobs.
So are we afraid of Google? No. But we’ll keep an eye on them while we continue to work with them. We see far more opportunities in their latest actions than threats.