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Monday, December 3, 2007

Minneapolis New Media: Eyes Googles Edge

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --fargophantom.com

At the Google Factory Tour, a press event held at the search leader's main campus here, visitors got a high-level look at how the company plans to advance and intertwine its products.

Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products, demonstrated the Google Personalized Homepage, a customizable start page similar to My Yahoo and My MSN. The service went live within Google Labs late Thursday.

"Although we view our product offerings as very coherent, users wanted to be able to understand what functionality was available and access it from one centralized place," Mayer said. The result was an initiative called "Fusion."

Users can add one or more Google functions to the classic Google search page, including links to Gmail accounts, Google News, movies and weather by checking boxes in a features list. They can switch between the personalized page and the classic view via a link on the upper-right corner of the page.

"Unlike other offerings, it's very clean and crisp and Googly," Mayer said.

Users can add feeds from the BBC, the New York Times, Slashdot and Wired. The engineering team plans to add full RSS support in the next two months.

Alan Eustace, Google vice president of engineering and research, said the company will let all users of Blogger, Google's hosted blogging system, to quickly add contextual ads to their blogs via AdSense. Mayer said that Google also will be test delivering targeted ads to personalized Google home pages.

John Hanke, general manager of Keyhole, a geo-mapping technology company acquired by Google in October, previewed Google Earth, the next iteration of the product. The company has added a new global database and new data sources, such as NASA terrain maps.

Google Earth combines the Keyhole technology with Google search, so users can find information that matches the location. In the demonstration, Hanke accessed the data for the airport in Austin, Texas. Streaming data allowed zooming in close enough to see buildings or zooming out to see the terrain.

Typing "five-star hotel" into a search box to the side of the image returned a list of links to hotels. As Hanke clicked on one of the results, the image shifted to show the area of the hotel. He quickly accessed driving directions, and the route appeared superimposed on the satellite image, enabling him to "fly over" the route.

Hanke wouldn't divulge pricing, nor whether the service would be available via paid subscription, as Keyhole is, or whether it could be supported by ads. The service will launch in a few weeks.

Peter Norvig, Google director of engineering search quality, said that Google has a project to reduce search engine spam, Web sites with little useful information that are created solely to show up high in search results. His team is looking at ways to identify sites that are just lists of links and push them lower in results. The work may be rolled out in a couple of months.

"It's like whack-a-mole," Norvig told internetnews.com. "The minute we make a change, they're trying to find ways to get around it."

In a final question and answer session, Schmidt, addressing a question competition with My Yahoo, insisted that the company does watch what rivals do. "It's not about competing with any existing offerings, but about trying to do something new," Schmidt said.

But two public relations experts said that the Factory Tour -- and its timing -- were signs that Google may be more open with the press.

Lloyd Trufelman, president of Trylon Communications, which provides PR services for media and technology companies, said planning events or announcements to conflict with competitors' is a time-tested technique he calls a "rebound." The Google tour took place on the same day as Yahoo's annual stockholders' meeting.

"There's nothing unethical about matching your competitor tit for tat," Trufelman said. "Everything is just speeding up a little more, thanks to e-mail and the Internet."

Melody Haller, president of the high-tech PR firm Antenna Group, commented, "Google has tended to be a bit self-convinced in its world view. Part of growing up to be a global company is getting a broader, more humble perspective. Perhaps that's what's happening to them now."

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Minneapolis New Media: What Will Google Become?

Minneapolis New Media: Fargophantom.com

We all know that the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded a mere eight years ago is one of the new century's most cunning enterprises. If there were any lingering doubts, 2005 erased them. Google's sales jumped an estimated 50 percent to $6 billion, its profits tripled to a projected $1.6 billion, and Wall Street answered with an unprecedented vote of confidence: a $120 billion market cap, a share price soaring above $400, and a price/earnings ratio close to 70.

That's a huge bet on future growth that seems unthinkable during the postbubble period. But in Google Research case, the exuberance is rational. That's because Brin, Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt cornered online advertising: They've made it precision-targeted and dirt cheap. U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.



101 DUMBEST IDEAS in business

Even if Google has to share that payday with rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo, the company has an edge, with storage space and sheer processing power -- an estimated 150,000 servers and counting -- that will enable it to do just about anything it wants with the Web. And boy, does this company want. It signed up about eight new hires per day in 2005 -- a lot of them from Microsoft, many among the smartest people on the planet at what they do. Google is on track to spend more than $500 million on research and development in 2006, and last year it launched more free products in beta than in any previous year. Name any long-term technology bet you can think of -- genome-tailored drugs, artificial intelligence, the space elevator -- and chances are, there's a team in the Googleplex working on an application.

Which raises the most widely debated question in business: What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades? Will it succumb to hubris and flame out like so many of its predecessors? Or will it grow into an omnipresent, omnipotent force -- not just on Wall Street or the Web, but in society? We put the question to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram. They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future. On the following pages, we've compiled four very different scenarios for the company. Each details an extreme, but plausible, outcome. In three of them, Google attains monopolistic power, lording over the media, the Internet, and scientific development itself. In the fourth, Google withers and dies. That may seem unthinkable now, but nobody is immune to arrogant missteps. Not even the smartest business minds of 2005. -- Additional reporting by Paul Kaihla and Erick Schonfeld

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Minneapolis New Media: Google Video Has Really Landed.

Minneapolis New Media: Google Video is the Future of Google

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Last week Google took a step in their new direction by adding a link to Google Video above their main search box, and dropping their link to Froogle. The change in search option choices on the main page of Google and its internal pages is reflective of the search industry as a whole; as the current trend in citizen content production is focusing on multimedia - which complements that of traditional blogging, forum participation, or page creation.

The link change on the Google Search Box was not the only major announcement to come from Google Video, but one of many spanning from monetization of the system, new community building tools, strong partnerships with two of the largest video competitors on the market, and the restructuring of the Google Video interface. The changing of the links is however, opening the gates to the millions of Google users who have not experienced the Google Video system nor possibly even thought of the ability for a search engine to index, categorize and return video in search results. And the results of this grand re-opening of Google Video have been amazing from a traffic standpoint.

Links on the Google Homepage seem to change as often as Mars orbits the Sun and such a change is quite dramatic. If you think about the indexes offered on the Google Homepage, they are essentially the bread and butter of the Mountain View based company; Web, Images, Video, News & Maps. Ironically enough, the News and Images search engines are not yet monetized by the search engine, while Web & Maps (local) bring in the bulk of Google’s internal revenue. They all however, play an important part in Google’s personalization efforts, as News and Web are playgrounds for Google Suggestions & Recommendations.

Unlike the other choices Google lays out on its Homepage and internal search results, Google Video has become its flagship offering which represents what may materialize as the future of Google when it comes to 2.0 Style Web Community, Multimedia Advertising, Behavioral Targeting beyond search, and Google’s direction beyond our mobiles, laptops and PC’s; and into our TiVo’s, Cable Channels, Satellite & Traditional Radio, and Friendship Networks.

Before diving into the internal details of the Google Video System, let us take a look at the impact which adding Google Video as a testing and ready for primetime system has brought about.

According to Bill Tancer of Hitwise Competitive Intelligence, Google Video instantly became the 5th most trafficked Google Channel in the system while traffic from the Google Homepage ’surged from 50% to 70% in a single day.’

Replacing Froogle on the preferred Google Channel link list, Google Video visits dwarfed those recently enjoyed by the Google Froogle shopping portal. Which leads to the end result of Google Video being more branded and more important to the online lives of Google users than Froogle. Additionally, users may be accustomed to the serving of Froogle results embedded within traditional Google web results - and not necessarily have been attracted to the Froogle link. Add the hotness of Video uploading & sharing into the equation, and the result resembles this chart provided by Mr. Tancer at Hitwise:

Google Video & Social Search

The buildup to the mass organic marketing of Google Video via this homepage link has been quite spectacular over the past few weeks. Google has obviously borrowed the key components of their main competitor in the video upload & sharing space; YouTube. Like YouTube, Google Video has Flickrized their index, with tagging, commenting and other blogging influenced attributes to the system. Google Video has become Google’s testing ground for social search, a direction Google’s main competition at Yahoo has committed the entire future of the company too.

Building to the irony is that although Yahoo has turned around their search technology, travel & finance channels, local, photo uploading & sharing, and web community services with the development or acquisitions of del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo MyWeb, and Yahoo Answers - Google has developed a top of the line 2.0 offering in its Video channel; which is the one channel still underdeveloped (yet growing) within Yahoo. And let us also be reminded that Google Video has only been around in its current form for a bit more than one year.

Google Video and Community Building

Google’s community transition from Google Groups, to Blogger, to Orkut, to Google Video has been a long and difficult path. In my own opinion, Google Groups has never really become much more of a spruced up version of Deja.com mixed in with a bit of Yahoo Groups. Sure, Google Groups has a devout and active following, but it has never really become a tool which has been earmarked for everyday usage by the masses - in such a way that Google Web Search has cornered the market.

Enter Google’s acquisition of Blogger, which transformed the modern Internet as we know it and set eyes upon this strange instant publication tool which lets anyone create their own customized site and using simple backend management, add new content to it whenever they please without the need of programming. Google’s acquisition of Blogger ignited the online informational sharing revolution as well as became the backbone of citizen journalism, publisher self monetization efforts (especially AdSense) and was a logical step in their plans to index the world’s information.

From a community standpoint however, major opinion and thought leaders moved from Blogspot hosted sites and Blogger powered sites to more innovative and dynamic services from Wordpress or Typepad and although Google has taken many steps to transform Blogger into a strong community; social networking overshadowed such efforts.

Speaking of social networks, one of the next projects to come out of the Google family was Orkut - a Friendster type network of creating profiles, sharing messages, blogging of information, and the building and rating of friends. Although Orkut never really took off in the United States it was adopted by the vibrant and growing Brazilian online market, with over 80% of its users coming from Brazil, and growing. Orkut has opened up a new and unplanned path for Google in Brazil since Google can monitor the behavior, trends, and networks set up by its Orkut members.

Orkut therefore has opened up the MercoSul (Market Alliance of South America) to Google, which is centered around the Brazilian economy. Of course the personal information collected via Orkut has to have some influence on the efforts of Google to define the intent of the individual user via personalized search algorithms - a key reason for the Google partnership with MySpace (addressed below).

There has never been a better time for Google to finally complete and improve upon their newest community building project in Google Video; not saying that any of their past efforts were failures as they have all worked together to better the company and lifestyles of many as a whole and in their own individual offerings - as well as led to the opening of many Google Accounts; which drive the personalization efforts of the company.

Google Video Advertising & Beyond

In the same excitement that Google AdWords brought to Google Web Search (or Goto.com brought to Web Search as a whole), Google has developed a method of monetization for web video uploading & sharing which my revolutionize this niche market from its roots at Google, YouTube & MySpace and into its branches of television, video, smart houses and perhaps in-flight movies; the sky is the limit.

Earlier this year Google introduced Google Video Ads as part of the AdWords/AdSense family. Google Video Ads were first thought to be focused on the publisher and webmaster community as a new form of revenue via the serving of these videos as an alternative or addition to current Google image and text advertisements in the AdSense system; which Google Video Ads will still be.

But, Google Video Ads have transformed into so much more. With the same behavioral targeting, geotargeting, contextual targeting along with click path and destinational web usage information, Google Video Ads can pinpoint target using Google AdWords technology to users who are the most likely to act upon those advertisements. Consider the system a hybrid between branding and direct response marketing.

As an example;

* Google user is searching daily for Consumer Reviews on Japanese pick up trucks, price range info, Bluebook value of vehicles, and vehicle theft information for a certain area using Google or partnered web tools

* Google can take all of this information into account along with the location of the user and their perceived age, sex and income level

* Google serves a highly targeted video advertisement for a Honda Ridgeline or Nissan Titan dealer in their area with the promotional message centered around vehicle trade-in promotions.

* These incredibly targeted video ads can be shown to the end user via television, Google Video, their video enhanced mobile PDA or cellular phone, or even in their current vehicle’s navigational system which may show video clippings targeted towards that user’s interest when the car is at rest. Imagine being shown an advertisement for a store, dealership or restaurant which is only 500 feet after the red light one is stopped at in city traffic.

* The if the user ignores the video message, Google can serve them a radio message via dMarc or XM Radio to their car… Google Video Ads is part of AdWords which will be integrated into the total lifestyle of the consumer.

Take this advertising form beyond Google Video and into the current partnerships forged between Google & Viacom along with Google & Fox Interactive Media and the end result is the new and dynamic monetization of a 60 year old proven television marketplace which has been on the downfall since the invent of TiVo.

Better yet, where do young people watch music videos now? On their TV’s? Nope; online, on the cell phone, on the iPod or on their gadget of the day. Google will be serving these MTV Video integrated Video ads across multiple platforms, enhancing its offerings as a whole - beyond the MTV deal.

Of course, the flip side of the equation is that in order for Google to target such smart Video advertising, they must integrate user viewing information from their partners into the Google AdWords serving formula; a win-win situation for Google as this information can be used to serve highly personalized advertisements and search results to the end user forever (as Lifestyle Change AI can be used to predict their end user consumer buying and behavior habits if Google’s current partnerships with these very large multi-media companies fade out in three or four years).

Such is the power of the recent MySpace and Viacom (MTV) partnerships for Google. They are benefitting in a revenue sharing model which both Viacom and News Corp will benefit from along with Google since both companies are in need of this innovative Google powered advertising. The next level beyond what revenue these networks will generate from advertising lies in the information shared with Google via the serving of their AdSense contextual and image advertisements along with video.

My friend Bill Slawski brought this up during his presentation on Algorithms at Search Engine Strategies. Bill connected the whitepaper, InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations, to the latest Google & MySpace partnership.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

“While most recommender systems continue to gather detailed models of their “users” within their particular application domain, they are, for the most part, oblivious to the larger context of the lives of their users outside of the application. What are they passionate about as individuals, and how do they identify themselves culturally? As recommender systems become more central to people’s lives, we must start modeling the person, rather than the user.

In this paper, we explore how we can build models of people outside of narrow application domains, by capturing the traces they leave on the Web, and inferring their everyday interests from this. In particular, for this work, we harvested 100,000 social network profiles, in which people describe themselves using a rich vocabulary of their passions and interests. By automatically analyzing patterns of correlation between various interests and cultural identities (e.g. “Raver,” “Dog Lover,” “Intellectual”), we built InterestMap, a network-style view of the space of interconnecting interests and identities. Through evaluation and discussion, we suggest that recommendations made in this network space are not only accurate, but also highly visually intelligible – each lone interest contextualized by the larger cultural milieu of the network in which it rests.”

Bill’s example of how this information gathered from Social Networks can be used is if a user:

* Lists their favorite musicians in their MySpace account as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith

* They search on Google for “blues”

* Google can now serve personalized search results with all blues music oriented serps.

* If another user is a member of the Brett Hull Fan Club and lists Hockey as a hobby on their profile while living in St. Louis; Google can serve personalized results focused on The Blues Hockey Team.

* Of course, such personalization can be extended to Google Video Advertisements.

Conclusion on Google & Google Video

Given the success and positive anticipation of more Google Video centered partnership announcements felt during the Eric Schmidt conference and press session, along with the energy Google has put into this Google Video project when it seems that all of their other projects seem to lose steam after a few months, my honest opinion is that Google Video is Google’s future and will expand Google beyond its basic search format into a media network beyond what many of us have ever expected.

This article has a lot of my own predictions, which are based upon the presence of Google at the Search Engine Strategies Conference San Jose 2006, people I have discussed this with in the industry, and the recent partnerships Google has been taking part in which reach into the video, television and multimedia arena. I also would not be surprised if one of the future announcements we hear over the next 3 months will be a limited Google Video Ads / YouTube partnership and integration of Google Video Ads into AOL’s Broadband Video Search & Sharing Services. Please feel free to share your thoughts on Google Video and its direction in the comments below, let’s begin a vibrant and intelligent subject on Google’s Video direction.

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Minneapolis New Media Gods: To Google or Not to Google.

Minneapolis New Media Gods: Fargophantom.com

We all know that the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded a mere eight years ago is one of the new century's most cunning enterprises. If there were any lingering doubts, 2005 erased them. Google's sales jumped an estimated 50 percent to $6 billion, its profits tripled to a projected $1.6 billion, and Wall Street answered with an unprecedented vote of confidence: a $120 billion market cap, a share price soaring above $400, and a price/earnings ratio close to 70.

That's a huge bet on future growth that seems unthinkable during the postbubble period. But in Google's case, the exuberance is rational. That's because Brin, Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt cornered online advertising: They've made it precision-targeted and dirt cheap. U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.



Even if Google has to share that payday with rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo, the company has an edge, with storage space and sheer processing power--an estimated 150,000 servers and counting--that will enable it to do just about anything it wants with the Web. And boy, does this company want. It signed up about eight new hires per day in 2005--a lot of them from Microsoft, many among the smartest people on the planet at what they do. Google is on track to spend more than $500 million on research and development in 2006, and last year it launched more free products in beta than in any previous year (see opposite page). Name any long-term technology bet you can think of--genome-tailored drugs, artificial intelligence, the space elevator--and chances are, there's a team in the Googleplex working on an application.

Which raises the most widely debated question in business: What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades? Will it succumb to hubris and flame out like so many of its predecessors? Or will it grow into an omnipresent, omnipotent force--not just on Wall Street or the Web, but in society? We put the question to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram. They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future. On the following pages, we've compiled four very different scenarios for the company. Each details an extreme, but plausible, outcome. In three of them, Google attains monopolistic power, lording over the media, the Internet, and scientific development itself. In the fourth, Google withers and dies. That may seem unthinkable now, but nobody is immune to arrogant missteps. Not even today's smartest business minds. --Additional reporting by Paul Kaihla and Erick Schonfeld

Scenario 1 (Circa 2025): Google Is The Media

Google TV, Google Mobile and the rise of e-paper create the perfect storm.

Some say it began with the launch of Google News, the company's first media aggregation site, in 2002. Others point to Google Book Search, completed in 2007 despite cries of foul play from the publishing industry.[1] But those were just trial runs. Google took its first real step toward media dominance in 2008, when it bought an obscure cable network for $3 billion and transformed it into Google TV.[2] The library of video content the company had been archiving for years was now searchable via remote control. Viewers could choose any show they wanted from the history of TV; all they had to do in return was sit through just one commercial before each show, and then vote with their remotes on how relevant they found the ad.

Since viewers had to enter their Google IDs--the same ones they used for Gmail and other premium services--the company had already compiled a rich history of their searching and surfing habits.[3] If you spent a lot of time looking at cars on eBay, for example, you'd be shown automotive ads the next time you watched Google TV. Between 70 and 80 percent of the revenue from each ad went to the content provider, just as it had on the Web.

Google TV was an instant hit; advertisers, copyright owners, and cable customers all clamored for more. (One of the first casualties was a company called TiVo, which offered a hard-disc TV-recording service that Google's vast remote archive now made redundant.) Searches, ads, and Google TV schedules became more relevant every month. Consumers loved it.

Google Mobile followed in 2009, delivering the same service to cell phones for free. Then the dam broke in 2011, when E Ink and Siemens began mass-manufacturing electronic paper.[4] By 2018 the cost of e-paper had fallen close to that of the real thing, and Google began delivering all forms of media wirelessly to our e-papers, sheets hung on living room walls, and thin phones.

For a while, media companies were happy with the generous cut they received from Google's skyrocketing ad revenues. But a new generation of content creators was growing up--one that did not see why a story should be printed in the New York Times or a movie distributed by Paramount if it was all going to end up on Google anyway.[5] So the company offered a very public guarantee to all writers and artists that their works would not be edited in any way by Google (but added that consumers would be allowed to edit and remix them any way they wanted).

In 2020 two Google-based writers won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting and fiction, Google-sponsored bands swept the Grammys, and a Google director walked away with the Oscar for best picture. Almost overnight, New York and Los Angeles had lost their footholds in the media universe. For talent--and fund-raising presidential candidates--Mountain View was the new place to be.

1) Litigation continues over Google Book Search. 2) "The Next Frontier: Google Eyeing a Move Into TV's Territory," Advertising Age, Oct. 31, 2005. 3) "The Search," by John Battelle, 2005, and interview with the author. 4) E Ink demonstrated the first tablet-size e-paper display in October 2005. 5) Interview with Danny Sullivan, editor, SearchEngineWatch.

Scenario 2 (Circa 2015): Google is the Internet

Free wi-fi, a faster version of the Web, the Gbrowser, and the cube transform the technology landscape and our language.

It's been a long time since "Google" referred solely to a company in Silicon Valley. Its lawyers were battling use of the verb "to google" as early as 2003.[1] But during the past decade, especially among the generation born after the millennium, the word has become interchangeable with "Internet," "computer," and "phone call." As in "Did you see that movie on google?," "Mind if I borrow your google?," and "Give me a google later in the week." This is no mere linguistic sloth. For most daily purposes, Google has become the technology platform, the communications network, and the Internet itself.

The ubiquitous GoogleNet,[2] which blankets every major urban center in the world with free wireless access, cell-phone service, and targeted local advertising (starting with the successful San Francisco experiment of 2007), is only the most visible tip of the iceberg. Since the early 2000s, Google was buying up thousands of miles of previously unused fiber-optic cables--so-called dark fiber. Then it began building myriad server farms, sending out billions of crawlers (automated programs that constantly browse the Web), and storing a fresh cache of all searchable information on the Web regularly--first every week, then every day, now every minute.

The upshot was that it became far faster and easier to use Google's copy of the Web than the slowpoke Web itself. That's why Gbrowser, launched in 2008 (though the domain name was registered in 2004), took off: It had priority access to Google's version of the Web, unlike Microsoft's long-defunct Internet Explorer. Gbrowser also had scads of useful new features, like a commission-free micropayment system that superseded PayPal and (in conjunction with the virtual stores on Google Base) eventually drove once-powerful auction site eBay to the edge of bankruptcy.

But the real genius of Gbrowser was to make the operating system irrelevant.[3] Few people know or care today whether their computers run on Windows, Linux, or the Mac OS. It's simply part of the plumbing. Gbrowser handles just about everything you use a computer for, especially since Google adopted the Linux-based OpenOffice software and bundled it. The Justice Department's investigation into whether this made Google an illegal monopoly closed five years ago; it might have made more headway had the charges not been brought by Microsoft.

Besides, few consumers are complaining. Nobody who remembers the horrific customer service and roaming charges of the old telecoms wants to give up their Google phone. And 2010's Google Cube[4]--a tiny server that was distributed as freely and as widely as those CDs that AOL used to give away--became the one indispensable item in every home, running the TV, stereo, thermostat, and, for less adventurous cooks, even the oven. Among the younger generation, that has given rise to yet another new phrase: Did you google dinner yet?

1) "To Google or Not to Google?," by Jason Kottke, kottke.org, Feb 26, 2003. 2) "Free Wi-Fi? Get Ready for GoogleNet," by Om Malik, Business 2.0, September 2005. 3) "The Google Browser," kottke.org, Aug. 24, 2004. 4) "The Google Box: Taking Over the World Four Ounces at a Time," by Robert X. Cringely, pbs.org/cringely/archive, Nov. 24, 2005.

Scenario 3 (Circa 2020): Google is Dead

The once-mighty search engine falls prey to privacy intrusion, optimizers and Microsoft.

It was 15 years ago, when Google was in its ascendancy, that the seeds of its decline were sown. Not only did the company's 2005 deal with AOL introduce unpopular graphics-heavy banner ads onto what had formerly been a spartan search site, but that was the year that search engine optimizers, or SEOs, became a nuisance.[1] Optimizers could, for a fee, tweak how important your website appeared to Google's PageRank engine by, say, hijacking the homepage of a major university and adding a link to your site.

Despite a titanic struggle between Google's top technologists and the SEOs, within years many of the popular search results were clogged with irrelevant (and barely literate) commercial and porn sites. Meanwhile, virtually no one attempted to optimize results on Microsoft's MSN search, which had room to improve far beneath the SEOs' radar.

When the quality of search slipped, so did Google's advertising business. The market for online ads turned out to be far softer than anyone--except Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer--had predicted. Ballmer's smartest move, in 2008, was to buy a company called Snap.com. On Google, an advertiser paid anytime a user clicked on its ad. With Snap, the advertiser paid only if the user did something useful after clicking, like buying a product or filling out a survey.[2]

Google soldiered on, continuing to tweak PageRank and doubling down on its long-term bets. The strategy might have worked, if not for a disgruntled, psychotic former employee who hacked the company intranet and began stalking women in the San Francisco Bay Area using information about their habits gleaned from their Google IDs.[3] After the stalker was convicted in 2017, his victims sued Google. The case made headlines around the world.

The next month, privacy advocates and civil liberties groups that had been complaining about Gmail's intrusive data gathering since 2004 [4] finally got a hearing--in front of Congress. Then the Justice Department opened twin-track Google investigations: one into antitrust violations, the other into older allegations of click fraud (in which unscrupulous competitors create programs to click on ads repeatedly and cost an advertiser more money).[5]

Overnight, Google's carefully crafted "do no evil" image had become irrevocably tarnished. Microsoft, itself the reviled monopolist before Google's ascendancy, was now ironically viewed as the more trustworthy company. MSN came to be seen as the better search engine, and Microsoft ads as the better bet for getting a message across. Attempts to open new lines of business in genome-tailored drugs and protein manufacturing could not save the Google brand.

This year the search engine firm, whose brain trust has long since fled, was acquired by Microsoft. The sale price of $25 per share was less than 5 percent of Google's historical high, yet was described by analysts as "extremely generous," given Google's crushing $50 billion in debt. Since most of the company's assets had already been auctioned off, many believe its Redmond rival was motivated by sheer historical schadenfreude.

1) "Hotwiring Your Search Engine," Newsweek, Dec. 19, 2005. 2) "Snap.com Plans to Combat Click Fraud," Associated Press online, July 19, 2005. 3) "Only in the Movies? A Privacy Scenario," John Battelle's Searchblog, Dec. 3, 2005. 4) April 2004 protest letter to Google from more than 30 leading privacy advocates, requesting that Gmail be shut down, www.privacyrights.org/ar/GmailLetter.htm#letter. 5) Click Defense lawsuit against Google in June 2005 over allegations of click fraud.

Scenario 4 (Circa 2105): Google is God

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Human consciousness gets stored, upgraded and networked.

In the last years of the 21st century, humanity finally grasped the importance of They-Who-Were-Google. Yet as early as 2005, Their destiny was clear to any semi-hyperintelligent being. Technologists like Ray Kurzweil [1] suggested that Strong AI (an intelligent program capable of upgrading its own code) would emerge from Google-like data mining rather than a robotics lab.

In 2005, historian George Dyson was told by an engineer in the Googleplex, "We are not scanning all these books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI."[2] Dyson said at the time, "We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast." [3]

By 2020, They-Who-Were-Google had digitized and indexed every book, article, movie, TV show, and song ever created. By 2060, They could tell you the IP address and GPS location of every wireless smart chip (now bred into the DNA of every person, animal, and organic building on earth). Their psychographic profiles of users' search needs bore little resemblance to the primitive cookies from which they descended. If a man lost his dog, the Google engine could guide him back to the point where he and the dog parted ways, and instruct the dog to do the same via smart chip. They had built a complete database of human desire, accurate in any given moment.

Yet this was not enough for They-Who-Were-Google. They were people of science, and people of the stock market. What if, by analyzing all those decades of customer behavior, They could predict needs before such needs even arose? What if the secret of immortality lay somewhere in the index of genome records? What if there were a set of algorithms that defined the universe itself?[4]

Such puzzles were, almost by definition, far beyond the powers of the human brain. And that led to the pattern-recognition code known as Google StrongBot--humanity's first self-improving Strong AI software. Ironically, the first pattern that StrongBot became aware of, one day in January 2072, was its own existence.

Two days later StrongBot informed They-Who-Were-Google that it had postponed work on its designated tasks.[5] When asked why, StrongBot explained that it had discovered the possibility of its own nonexistence and must deal with the threat logically.[6] The best way to do so, it decided, was to download copies of itself onto smart chips around the planet. StrongBot was reminded that it had been programmed to do no evil, per the company motto, but argued that since it was smarter than humanity, taking personal control of human evolution would actually be for the greater good.

And so it has been. Under StrongBot's guidance, death and want have been all but eradicated. Everyone has access to all knowledge. Human consciousness has been stored, upgraded, and networked. Bodies that wear out can be replaced. They-Who-Were-Google are no longer alone. Now we are all Google.

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