Anindo, we all know why Goggle Goggled OVER. But, since it might not ever go public...I don't consider OVER to be a broken stock. Jmop
>>How long can Google keep the good times rolling? It's one of the few queries you cannot answer by using the popular Web search service.
The future seems unlimited. Google has gone from an obscure mathematical reference (based on "googol," the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes) to a verb. Want to know who said, "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes"? Just "Google" it, and discover it may not be who you thought.
Perhaps Google's most significant, and largely unacknowledged, accomplishment has been to democratize information access. It is this legacy that may come under most duress as Google moves forward.
Before the Web, searches through proprietary services such as Lexis/Nexis and Dialog required special training and were costly. With the Web, information once consigned to the moldering archives of news media, corporations and government became instantly available, if you knew where to look.
Most of the time, you did not. Early search engines from Alta Vista, Yahoo! and others returned every imaginable citation except the one you wanted. Yet in the mid-1990s you got the feeling from venture capitalists, Web gurus and investors that the search was about as effective as it was going to get, and that becoming a "Web portal" was the best move for search services.
Google disproved that by adding the magic and power of human intuition to the search. It did so by studying its users' requests — the drilling downs, misspellings, proper nouns vs. generic terms. Today when you want to know how to spell "seige," Google responds with its signature "Did you mean" function containing the right spelling: siege. And when you type "Alaska," you get the airline as well as the state.
Google stuck up for Web users' interests by refusing to clutter the screen and slow its response time with ads. Yes, there is advertising, but it's text-based and not distracting. And last week Google added a New Economy wrinkle: cost-per-click pricing, where advertisers pay only when Google users click on their ad.
Cost-per-click gets at a significant opportunity for Web commerce, which is that payment can be based on each transaction rather than a subscription or flat-fee approach.
I wonder if some day we'll pay a modest fee to Google for a successful Web search. Although the idea sounds foreign, proprietary services in the past based their entire business models on the value of their results.
In a way, Google has become the Web's brain, its synapses fired by 3 billion searchable documents and 150 million queries daily. As with HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey," Google's smarts can be scary. As the court of first resort for finding information on the Web, Google could exert untold influence over how we think.
With only 300 employees and a modest headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Google seems an unlikely candidate for Big Brother. Touring its offices recently, I was struck by how similar Google is today to other bright, unspoiled tech start-ups of the past, notably Netscape, Apple and Microsoft.
Overlooking its lobby is a big screen that silently scrolls with real-time search queries from around the world (a surprising number from Japan). It's a heady but sobering reminder of Google's reach, where queries can be made in 72 different languages.
Google's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, struck me as sincere in their desire to keep the company independent and visionary. But can Google avoid the hubris and greed that turned Netscape essentially into a money play, Apple into a niche player and Microsoft into a global monopoly?
It's a significant question. If Google sells out to monied or powerful interests, it could easily be turned into a subtle but pernicious Web marketing vehicle, forcing unwanted information on users while filtering out alternative news and opinion. That would be a waste of its transforming technology and leave the Internet a poorer place for learning and enlightenment.
Let's hope the free and "open" spirit that has driven the company's vision and success so far can endure even as Google grows and prospers.
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
