Everybody says it’s a marriage made in heaven: Google has bought Pyra. The Web’s favorite search engine, which by some accounts handles as much as 70% of all searches, will now own the pioneering and still-leading Blogger.com service, the single most visible enabler of blogs anywhere.Full disclosure: I’ve been using Blogger.com to drive Subtraction.com since late 2000, and the majority of its archives remain on that service. Of course, I’ve been trying to move over entirely to Movable Type, but it’s been slow-going; the amount of work it takes to set up a Blogger.com blog is trivial compared to a system like Movable Type.
And, like countless other surfers, Google is my main search engine. The company provides consistently excellent search results, and its forays into search solutions, publicly available APIs, meta-data and other extra-curricular activities all have the cachet of a hip, grassroots operation.
Any merger worries me though, as they so often amount to compromise and scuttled expectations. Pyra subsisted for a long time on a shoestring budget, user donations and an independent spirit. I just hope that the company’s character survives alongside Google’s disturbing Big Borther tendencies.
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