Let Me Google That For You!

Ok, you may or may not have noticed that I am a bit of a Google fan boy. I remember back when I was in high school and Google first came on the scene I challenged the librarian to a search engine contest. I used the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and she used some other engine, probably Yahoo (points if you can tell me what Yahoo stands for) we both search for some information on a topic I think I was writing a paper on at the time. My search found by far a more relevant result, than any of the top 10 results she received, so I won, and Google won. Basically from that point on I was hooked, and no other search engine would do for me anymore. I have also jumped on to every product that Google puts out, with the exception of Wave, cause I honestly don’t understand it yet and don’t want to spend a lot of time using it. Google has become a huge part of my online life; this is basically do to the fact that they provide services that are free and easy to use. The internet is currently in a phase of clean design and high usability (partly why I think that MySpace is getting pwned so hard right now) The Google products definitely fit the bill, I love the simplicity of the bar at the top with the link to the various services, like mail, calendar, etc. This blog is published by Google using their free Blogger software.

Google’s stated purpose is to organize the world’s information, but they make their money through ads, and all that information is a big part of their ad strategy. Of late there has been a lot of frightened rumblings about the power that Google wields on the internet. They potentially have all your emails from Gmail, any search query you perform while signed into your account (and once your signed in it leave you signed in) the event you are planning via the calendar, as well and any other information you have offered up on the altar of the Google cloud. Having all this information in one place is very convenient, but for some people its also very scary. I used to be a bit afraid of the amount of information that I have made available to Google, and there is the point, it is information that I made available! Google did not force me to subscribe to their products, I could have used one of the many other free mail clients for my personal email, I could use a different calendar (maybe one with kittens). Typically I use whatever I determine is the best at the time for the need I have, when I graduated from college I needed a new mail client and so I started using Gmail, which lead me to use the other Google products too, but I chose to use these products, so I gave Google my information.

Google themselves have of late been producing way to both see what information they have on you, as well as ways to export the information out of Google and potential move it to someplace else on the internet. I totally understand the reasoning for creating this, it gives people the warm fuzzies thinking they can walk away at anytime, but what are you going to do with that information? I personally think that there are 2 types of people that would actually walk away, the first are people that have a ton of information with Google and get scared by that amount Google knows about them, the second are people that have very little information in Google and remove it to basically make themselves as invisible as possible on the internet. The first people are heavy internet users, so what are they going to do with that information other that put it into another set of services, like Yahoo, who will then own all that information. The second type doesn’t really want their info on the web anyway so it’s not a big deal to them to not use these services.

I am definitely the first type, I want to have all my information at my finger tips, either from any computer I have access too, or my phone and to go this well… Google I choose you! (woot Pokémon reference) I do not plan to take my information out of Google, because basically I am not paranoid about them having this information. As the internet moves forward and the cloud becomes more powerful everything will be on the internet somewhere, and at least with Google I am putting my information all in one entities hands.

Recently I have read a lot of articles about Google’s search suggestions. It’s a fun game, you type in part of a search query and see what that search engine brings back for result, and the results are often humorous. I am all for a laugh, but I think the whole suggestion thing is being taken a bit far, while I am not a Google developer I would guess that the reason for the suggestion is to cut down on the amount of typing you need to do before you get to your results, if the suggestion does not have what you are looking for then you keep typing till you are actually searching for what you are looking for on the web. On top of that the suggestion must be based on a computer algorithm and that algorithm will change over time as Google makes changes to the way it does search so I would not put too much effort into thinking about the greater implications of the search suggestions.

Lastly I would just like to briefly talk about Rupert Murdoch. Rupert (I am going call him by his first name) recently came out saying he was going to take all of the News Corp content out of Google, basically blocking Google crawlers from aggregating the information. His goal here is to stop Google from “stealing” his intellectual properties. I put “stealing” in quotes here because, well, Rupert is crazy! He thinks that by doing this he will stop Google from giving access to News Corps properties, properties he wants to sell to the consumers and make money from. I am not some crazy everything should be free person, I think that companies have a right to make money, cause that money goes to the people that work there who are also consumers (the amount of compensation is a totally different argument) Rupert thinks that he can just produce the properties, like the wall street journal and the people that want them will pay to read them.

There are at least 2 things wrong with this approach

1) The audience of people that will do exactly what he wants is not a self sustaining audience. It does not renew on its own, lets use the Journal as the example. The Journal is a subscription (which is the mail pay model for news papers, Ryan correct me if I am wrong here), people sign up for the Journal cause they are interested in reading it and because they know what the Journal is by its reputation. The people that are willing to subscribe to the Journal are already roped into paying for it so that is fine, but this makes it harder to attract new people who are willing to become part of this model. This stops a viral audience, one of the things that the internet does well from view the articles. I am sure if you asked Rupert this would be more or less what he is going for, he wants to stop these people that just casually consumer his content and limit to just those that will pay, well as I said before the people that want to pay are already paying and are already viewing the content so this is not attracting any new eyes, hence this approach is not self-sustaining. If he was to allow the some of the content to be available for free, as well as not blocking the biggest search engine in the world from accessing the materials, casual readers would come across the article, and either they would read it and do nothing (which is what Rupert does not want as this does not make him money) or they might read it and tell someone else to read it or put a link up on Facebook, or tweet the article. If every set of eye balls falls into one of those two categories then the more eyeballs you get to see the article the more likely that the article will be seen by someone that wants to read the Journal and would pay for it! Even if the percentage of the people who read the article and end up paying for it is small that percentage is going to be greater than the number of people that are just willing to pay for it already and are already paying (people die, need a way to keep drawing people in).

2) He can go ahead and do this, but all it will do is make people go to one of the millions of other free sources for the information. I mean imagine it, New Corp blocks Google, now all the people that use Google, which is almost everyone, have a whole where the News Corp material used to be, opening up a hole in the market that can be filled by a someone else, who will provide the same news and free, and if done correctly will make them a lot of money. Rupert would be creating a vacuum, but it would not be a big enough vacuum to change much of anything, unless he could get all the other big media outlets to also block Google too, and I personally think that this will not happen.

Rupert is showing his crazy old man side, he is trying to apply the business model that worked for print news papers to the internet age, an age where click-throughs and referral traffic is important, cause that is how your stuff gets seen on the net, we live in a world where Googling something is a verb in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. To most people Google is the internet it’s the way things are found. If I want information on something I am not going to check if there is an article in the Journal about it, I am going to Google it and if there is an article on what I am looking for I will give it a read.

So Rupert, give it a rest, Google is not clogging up yours tubes or stealing your revenue, and if Google is really affecting your bottom line then the fault lies with you, and a business model that does not work on the internet. Sorry old man but the times they are a changing and you better change too or else be left behind (granted I would not mind being left behind with all his money).