Time for Googlepalooza!

The New York Times concludes that Google made the Web safe for advertising.

TRUE, major ad buyers still spend a majority of their client's online budgets on banners and display ads and, increasingly, on video commercials. But even in the deployment of these formats, one can see the effects of Google's civilizing influence: these advertisements, for the most part, eschew the strong-arm tactics of earlier times. David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, said, "Paid search has brought to the fore the cliché 'the consumer is in control,' and there is no going back."

Robert X. Cringely declares game over: Google will soon be the Net:

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

Forbes quotes a man who foresees a day in which Google is All-Knowing:

Marc Meyer, who knew Schmidt at UC, Berkeley and worked with him at PARC, says Schmidt sees a day when Google will hold everyone's data on a "trust me" basis. "He told me, ‘If you want it to be private, don't put it in a computer,'" says Meyer, now at a recent tech startup. "Eric has an Anakin Skywalker conundrum. He has absolute power, and it will be hard to resist the Dark Side."

The Washington Post proclaims that Google's main focus is to be a bull in a china shop:

The soul of the Google machine is a passion for disruptive innovation.

Powered by brilliant engineers, mathematicians and technological visionaries, Google ferociously pushes the limits of everything it undertakes. The company's DNA emanates from its youthful founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who operate with "a healthy disregard for the impossible," as Page likes to say. Their goal: to organize all of the world's information and make it universally accessible, whatever the consequences.

And all of this is because it is so amazingly, profoundly good at search. Distinguished professors of medicine are not as valuable as they once were.

But since this is a "fair and balanced" blog, I'll end by referring you to "Disturbing Facts About Google".

Comments

[Ted Craig]

I use Google all the time, but I have to admit that somedays I feel Google is SkyNet. Still, there's one thing all these pundits are ignoring: Google is a behemoth but it is also very susceptible to the force of entrepreneurship. Two smart engineering students could be working on a project today that will make Google irrelevant in two years. I know this seems farfetched, but so did Google topping $200 a share.

[Jake]

This is scary stuff.

Before the election, the left had a project of reporting conservative blogs to Google as hate sites. Google immediatly delisted a number of these conservative blogs. Given the far left politics of the two owners, this was not surprising. It took a massive email campaign to get Google to rescind the delistings.

Google will be putting a left-wing filter on the news just as MSM has done for years.

[Jake]

I agree with Ted:

Remember in the late 90s when these same people were saying that if you did not own a internet portal, you were doomed to failure. Billions were spent buying up portals.

The two google guys working on a shoestring made all that portal money worthless. Google is ripe for a takedown as the way it presents search results is irritating and many times it is less than useful.

Two guys working in their basement could do the same to Google as it did to others. None of this stuff is rocket science.

[AC]

Followed a link over here from JohnInCarolina - good site.

Google is certainly several billion dollars searching darn hard for a
areal business model.

Ask yourself this: how many searches did it take for you to leave
Altavista/Yahoo/whatever and use google? For me it was a week.

Now ask yourself: how long to leave google for something with better
results?

-AC