Originally and with much enthusiasm I wrote about Google seen becoming the next Borg, where in our collective consciousness we tried to see what was available to us using the Google search engine.
Originally, I was amused by the idea of Google being compared to Microsoft, in that you always saw Microsoft and the Borg metaphor everywhere. Now it looks like the Google brain has had a stoke and the things it used to remember about the web are no longer available to the Google brain. That would mean that if someone uses Google exclusively, they also no longer know something either.
The dependency of institutions to comply with various legal requirements, from HB 1386 to SOX to COPA to HIPAA, censorship imposed by governments, international policies, WIPO, and the host of others puts a burden on search engines that needs to be acknowledged. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have to deal with the increasing litigious environment where people are willing to sue for what they think they need to do, opt completely out of the system, and indeed in some cases feel that they have to opt out to retain their own readership or customers. Google in especial has been in the press about this a lot, Belgium papers have opted out, Google voluntarily stopped carrying supremacy or deemed racist news papers, worked with censorship in China much like Yahoo and MSN, and in other words, is becoming if not already a multi-national corporation, with all the benefits and liabilities of being one.
While Google’s original goal was to capture the worlds information, and delighted Google technical people said,
“The inspiration was a trip he (George Dyson) recently made to Google’s headquarters, where an engineer told him, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” After reporting this comment, Dyson quotes Alan Turing on the development of AI systems: “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children. Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.” (Nicolas Carr via George Dyson).
The problem exists then when swatches of information or whole classes of information are kept out of the system, the system then has had a stroke, what was once known is harder to find, and other options other up and coming search engines need to be used to find things. Much like rehabilitation, people find other ways of doing something that they used to do. While Google keeps on powering forward to garner more and more of the search engine market share, people, newspapers, web sites, and other data sources begin to opt out, which is a prime opportunity for Yahoo and/or MSN to show where they differentiate. Nevertheless, they too have been here, and done essentially the same thing, decided to censor or remove data from their indexes.
Google’s recent trouble with news providers (people opting out, sometimes by legal means) in Europe opting out of the Google news system is the start of the backlash. Google being sued for the image search and loosing, Google’s spats with various governments, like China and Brazil, as well as Google’s recent changes to their TOS indicate that as Google matures, what was acceptable for a small start up or even mid size company is no longer acceptable for a staid blue chip internet power house. Google is growing up into the world of multi-nationals, and finding that the original drivers and goals for that company are difficult to maintain in that world. The problem is not that the information is not there, but that it has been voluntarily exorcised from the system, and people that want information will go elsewhere.
Has Google peaked? With the purchase of You Tube, with the advertising deals with MySpace, and others as an attempt to “gain more eyeballs” Google watchers have to wonder if the phenomenal growth of Google has reached a stasis point. They are no longer the bright boys in the valley, and are getting negative attention; Google can do wrong, or make mistakes.
Google still has some room to run, will probably have years left of good times, but as more and more comparisons are made between Google and Microsoft, one has to wonder what is down the road for Google, and how they will work the future to the benefit of everyone. Google is making choices, and telling its users what is acceptable and what is not, rather than just being a search engine looking to collect the “worlds” information. The world has a few words about that, and it is not good for Google.
Google may have peaked, but there are still places for the company to explore, but as they move away from the “pure search engine” and into the realm of applications, toolbars, advertising powerhouse, and all the host of things cooking in the Google labs, are they going to be distracted by too many things going on? Are they the next advertising monopoly, with all that that sentence entails? Will the growing bureaucracy that is usually found at big companies going to hit Google, are we in for a bureaucratic slow down, where everything gets project managed to death so they can maintain a handle on what is going on?
Google watching is going to be interesting, but the basic concepts remain, Google by its own choice, is doing things that meet multi-national corporation standards, which compromise the initial stated goals of the company. Google is acting like a company in search of growth, and it appears to be growth at any cost, the debate will be how well the new purchases are integrated into the current systems that Google has, and how well the population that uses them will accept Google’s management.
Watching the YouTube purchase will be an indicator of Google’s perceived value to the grass roots that made YouTube a hit. Google by no means is out for the count, nor are they going to go away or collapse, but what we are seeing is the same behaviors out of Google that we saw out of many companies where growth at any cost became the watch word. That is where all the decisions that the company makes will be more and more interesting to watch down the line. Realistically though, Google may have already had its golden years, and in the twilight of those years, begins to act more like a multi-national than the daring startup that they were.
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Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
