Google: personal assistant, or global overlord?
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Blog: Once again, bloggers ask: is Google moving toward the dark side?
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In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter's blog, discussing the race to be the default identity system for the Internet.. "I wouldn&#185;t count out Google, they've got a lot of users, and a lot of money. I think they could probably buy Yahoo, but someone else would have to do the math." Ashkan Karbasfrooshan did the math.
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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Best known for its popular search engine, Google is rapidly rolling out new products and muscling into Microsoft's stronghold: the computer desktop. The competition means consumers get more choices and better products.
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When computer users hunt for information on the Internet, they typically turn to Google or Yahoo. When analysts working for US intelligence look for documents and data stored on computers
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By Jefferson Graham  LOS ANGELES -- Internet search giant Google wants to be everywhere you are online. It hopes to be to the Internet what Microsoft is to the desktop, ever-present and essential.
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(InfoWorld) - Universal search and automated translation are big parts of Google's future, a company executive said Friday in Beijing. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president, search products and user experience, said Google had invested in automatic translation as a way to improve search results across various languages. "CLIR (cross language information retrieval) is better if we can search all the Web pages in every language and return the best search results," she said at a Google "product salon" in the Chinese capital. Mayer said it is particularly advantageous for native readers of languages that have only a small representation on the World Wide Web. "Only one percent of the content on the Web is written in Arabic. With this kind of technology ... if you can imagine us taking that query in Arabic and translating into other languages, it really increases the breadth of the results." She referred to it as "a counter-intuitive advance in search." Mayer said that Google is just getting started with universal search, which allows users to conduct searches across different media, including text, video, images, and audio. Using speech-to-text technology, users could eventually search a piece of video for phrases and keywords without having to view it. She also said that Google was moving towards integrating all of its different search engines, including its Google Book Search and Google Patent Search, to produce comprehensive results for the same search. Mayer admitted that bringing such total results to the end user was not going to happen overnight. "We're just getting started with universal search, there are a lot of issues to overcome here."
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Google&#39;s new Desktop Search software is a muscle car among search engines, racing through personal data stored inside your computer to instantly find things you can&#39;t easily locate.
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Everyone is ga-ga over Google. Time to get excited about Yahoo?
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Not too long ago, Google Inc seemed little more than a nuisance to Microsoft Corp&#39;s software domination. No more. As Google rapidly rolls out new products, the company best known for its wildly popular search
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Google is in the online ad-service business. Why does it lavish attention on software developers and open-source projects? Kicking offline Web apps into gear
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Step by step and bit by digital bit, Google is taking over the way PC users find, manage and receive information. The Mountain View, Calif.
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By Robert Verkaik In a mission statement that raises the spectre of an internet Big Brother to rival Orwellian visions of the state, Google has revealed details of how it intends to organise and control the world's information.
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OK, I&#39;ll be the first to admit I&#39;m probably out of my league writing about the latest Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) tool being offered for beta testing.
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Google Inc. is best known for finding information online, but sometimes the Internet search leader also works behind the scenes to look for missing people like renowned aviator Steve Fossett.
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Tabby 'wants to be alone' Google has raised fresh privacy concerns in the US, thanks to its new Street View service on its maps. It is apparently not enough that the advertising broker would like to find your next job for you, or tell you what you might want to do at the weekend, now it wants to peer into your living rooms.â¦
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INTERNET giant Google has taken its searching tools one step further with a service for individual desktops. Its new desktop search application means users can search their email, files, web history, and chats