I often ignore unusual punctuation marks (“Yahoo!” becomes “Yahoo,” for example), but “Buscape” sounds like some futuristic thing involving mass transport. So, instead, I’m here to report that Google has signed deals with UOL and Buscapé in Brazil.
This simultaneously represents a win for Google and a loss for one of the company’s biggest rivals. “UOL (#1 ISP and top 5 web destination) and Buscapé (#1 comparison shopping website in Brazil and latin America) are leaving Yahoo’s content network,” states Marcelo Sant’Iago (who also drops the exclamation mark, you’ll note).
Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker then picks up the thread. “Being the largest Internet using country in Latin America, Brazilians are already served Google advertising when visiting Globo.com (Brazil’s top TV & entertainment network), Google’s Orkut is the social network of choice amongst Brazilians and if you search YouTube for music and band names, A LOT of the videos uploaded are by Brazilian Internet users,” he writes.
Baker then calls this development a “bom successo for Google, and a rather large blow to Yahoo Search Marketing in Brazil.” And Baker drops Yahoo’s exclamation mark, as well.
Google has been doing quite well in Brazil in the past month or so; it first teamed up with some Brazilian Indians to stop illegal logging, and then won a court case involving YouTube. Perhaps the YouTube and UOL-Buscapé developments are even, in some way, a result of the logging-related action. In any event, I rather hope nothing called “Buscape” ever comes into being.
