Google Needs To Shed Some Businesses

Google (GOOG) began offering $10 to customers who sign up for its Checkout service, a competitor to Ebay’s (EBAY) PayPal. Paying to get customers seems like a bad sign, but, who knows?

Google does have a bunch of other businesses that it launched and have been hanging around. None of them seems to be close to leading its category on the internet. Wall St. sometimes gets concerned that the big search company is getting a bit too far afield from its major business.

Google Directory seems like an unnecessary business. It searches the web by category. That would seem to overlap quite a bit with Google’s regular search features.

Froogle, the online shopping search business for finding wine bars and bridal shoes, competes with a large number of shopping search companies. Google ought to see if Amazon (AMZN) would buy it.

Google Groups is a sort of MySpace section. It does things a bit differently from other social sites, but there are some many of these, what does Google need it for. News Corp (NWS) might take the property off Google’s hands.

Picasa, the Google business for editing and sharing photos competes with Yahoo!, Kodak, Photobucket, and a hundred other sites. Google should sell it to Photobucket, the larges photo site, and take a piece of the Bucket when its goes public.

Google Talk competes with Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and a ton of other company. Sell it to TimeWarner (TWX) to build up AIM.

Then, there is Google Accelerator. This software allegedly speeds up web searching using cookies and loading pages that were not requested. We tested it here. It seems to slow down pages loading and ate up a lot of CPU.

Maybe if Google would break out these businesses in its 10-Qs and 10-K investors could figure out why they exist. Or, maybe Google could just put its product road map online like Pfizer (PFE) does with its drug development pipeline. But, they probably don’t feel the need.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.