Google to acquire Digg again - but why?

Yet again the rumours fly that Google will acquire Digg, this time for c $200m. Many are reporting this today, but I have the same question as Venturebeat - why bother?

If Yahoo and AOL can build their own news aggregator properties, why can’t Google refine its own Google News site — where Digg may or may not be integrated with — or start its own Digg clone rather than buy Digg in the first place? Presumably, Yahoo! Buzz is worth more than Digg if one looks only at traffic numbers. And [AOL] Propeller could very well be headed for success, as well.

However, as the TechCrunch piece notes, Digg’s voting system seems to have fascinated Google. Is Google more interested in Digg’s algorithm than its name?

Google has been quite interested in “social search” for months — broadly defined as the use of social data like you and your friends preferences, to help determine search results. It has more recently been experimenting with letting its search users vote on the quality of rankings, similar to how Digg users vote on stories.

It says quite a lot to me about Google if:

(i) It does no think it can build a digg-alike, whereas AOL and Yahoo could

(ii) Google of all people wants to buy others' algorithms.

It always makes sense to buy smaller, off-centre services from outside - like Jaiku for example - but Digg is essentially a flavour of search and rating, which one would have thought is more core Google. There is an argument that this way they buy customers and going concern lock, stock and barrel - but with their market dominance they would probably get traction as soon as they launched.

We noted when Google bought YouTube that in our view this showed a strategic shift in stance from innovator to incumbent, where the insiders are focussed more on keeping the existing Biz as Usual going, and new new stuff is bought rather than built. More expensive, but lower risk of internal failure, won at the expense of internal capability and confidence however.

This would imply that they remain on that incumbency trajectory.

Update - Google has apparently walked away (assuming the rumour was true) - they must've been reading Broadstuff