Google denies testing e-commerce competitor to eBay

San Francisco (CA) - Responding to speculation arising from a New York Times report yesterday, Google’s product marketing manager, Tom Oliveri, posted to his company’s official blog that the company is testing a new service for helping individuals to get their content indexed through Google.

The relevant sentence of Oliveri’s post is this : "We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps."

The Times story notes that Google’s test site for this service was inadvertently discovered by a British programmer who discovered the subdomain for the new service, by way of testing a function he was writing. The report says one page that the programmer found contained the sentence, "We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free." It then compared this test product to a similar classified advertising campaign offered by eBay, the online auction house considered by some to be a Google competitor, if only in the category of "big Internet companies."

But according to Bloomberg News, yesterday’s news apparently led one Bear Stearns analyst to speculate publicly that Google was testing an online marketplace to compete with eBay, citing the analyst as having interpreted the programmer’s screenshots and concluded it "looked like an online marketplace." The Bloomberg report had stated this "signals Google’s intention to expand further beyond Web search," before being corrected later in the morning to focus solely on the classified advertising angle. Blogs took up the cause throughout the day, reporting headlines such as, "Google Tests its Reputed eBay Killer."

As a result, shares of both eBay and Google traded sharply lower yesterday, with eBay taking the biggest hit, at one point down $1.85. On account of corrections today (in more ways than one), Google shares this morning are trading higher by as much as 7 points, and eBay shares are also trading up over 1%.