Google’s serious about creating relationships with the greater Academia – its founders were collegiate all-stars building printers out of Legos, and of course badly-named search engines (Google was once called BackRub, we imagine because that was Larry Page’s best pickup line) – ahem, as more and more universities turn their email systems over to the search engine company.
“Google Courting More Students With Email”
Yes, everybody knows GMail rocks. Well, not everybody, the email service’s numbers, when compared to Yahoo and Hotmail, are abysmal.
Ears are pricking up across British and Irish campuses, the BBC reports, Trinity College Dublin hands over the email reigns to Google. The Mountain View, Calf.-based search company says it is seeking a lifelong relationship with students.
Trinity College Dublin’s move follows a handful of others, including Michigan and Arizona in the States, and Egypt, Kenya, and Rwanda.
Google likes academics, no doubt, because this where they get their best recruits, and cozying up to colleges also gets the company that much closer to its ultimate goal: indexing the world’s information. Google at the door of the university library is a dog that smells your steak dinner.
Hence all the scanning that is ensues over the next decade for the Google Books project.
And lets not forget all the pizza.
At this point, when Google is already so dominant in the market, we wonder if their recruiting efforts, which have successfully drained the talent pool from which its competitors dredge, are just to spite Microsoft and Yahoo.
We also wonder, if Google loves academia so much, why hasn’t the company made a bid for Facebook? The company missed the boat on MySpace, and Orkut is as flat as flat can be. With the collegiate network just sitting there pondering an IPO, you might do well to predict Google is thinking about swallowing it up.
