As search engine marketers, many of us spend a good chunk of our time studying Google’s moves. We see the progress being made in GMaps, GAnalytics, GChrome, GDesktop Search, etc., and while we tip our hats to Google for developing wave after wave of innovative ideas, there’s always that slight undercurrent tickling our feet and keeping us aware of Google’s exponentially increasing stockpile of the world’s most valuable commodity: information.
Spend any time in a technical forum (surely most of you have your honorary degree from WebmasterWorld.com as I do), and you’ll come across dozens of conspiracy theories about where Google is headed – some of which culminate in the synchronized detonation of all the world’s atomic bombs or in Lindsay Lohan becoming our next President – and yet others that are pretty spot-on.
My take on things is that Google itself doesn’t even know where it’s going… it just knows that acquiring as much information as it can grab ensures continued success. I’d like to hear your thoughts on where Big G is headed in the coming decades, and for those who have never considered the repercussions of all Google’s helpful little applications, I’ll drop some knowledge on you:
1. Information is the world’s most valuable commodity. Oil’s a big commodity right now, but look at it this way: if you had access to all the political agendas, all the economic projections and all the alternative energy R&D, you’d be able to control or even eliminate oil. And remember, oil wasn’t worth a damn thing until someone acquired the knowledge of its applicable benefits. Information is the foundation of any tangible commodity.
2. Google is in the business of acquiring, analyzing, and archiving information. In the U.S. at least, it is blowing its competitors out of the water in that respect. It has information from web searches, desktop searches, corporate and personal website statistics, geographic data, satellite images… we could do this all day, people.
3. The information Google collects isn’t information in the way our ancestors thought of it. Libraries have a ton of information… but all information in a library is the result of questions that have already been answered and ideas that have already been fleshed out. What Google (and other search engines) collect is a new layer of information that has never been collected before on such a large scale: the thoughts and behaviors of humans before they’ve gotten their questions answered. In that way, Google knows more about us than we do.
Okay, so Google knows a lot about us – namely, what we want to know. Is that bad? On the surface, wouldn’t life be a lot more productive if we had a tool that could not only answer all our questions, but could analyze, predict and project the answers to questions we haven’t even asked yet? Or can the power of such a tool be made to shift our behaviors and thoughts rather than serve them?
Grab your “The End Is Nigh” picket sign and gets to respondin’.
