World's virtual phone book

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It has been a busy week for Google

Can the all-seeing, all-knowing Google be trusted to rule the world?

February 6, 2009 (from TOL)

It started last weekend, when a Google employee typed a single backslash in the wrong place at the wrong time. This act resulted in the Google website marking every page on the internet as potentially harmful. The internet was no longer a safe place. Google, the web’s gatekeepers, said so.

The breakdown only lasted for around 40 minutes and the company spent the rest of this week trying to make it up to humanity. In just a few days, Google gave us the ability to virtually plunge the depths of the oceans and then track the every movement of friends and family using our mobile phones. It also found time to map Mars and helped set up a new university to prepare scientists for an age when machines are cleverer from man.

All of this frantic activity displays how pervasive and powerful Google has become. No government or organisation in history has held so much information about us. Through its search engine, Google knows our likes, dislikes, even our vices.

Through its email service, GMail, it holds the keys to the private correspondence of millions. Once you send a message to someone using the service, three parties can access it: you, the person you wrote to, and Google. We have to trust all three keep the conversation private. Whether you know it or not, you have a personal relationship with Google, sometimes one more intimate than with the closest of friends.

The signs are that Google will hold even more influence over us in the coming few years, with the company set to release an endless stream of products and projects. These include a plan to digitise and search through almost every book ever published. Another project will allow people to store health records with the site that can update with data coming from medical device. So as a heart rate monitor takes your pulse, for example, it will automatically appear in your Google account. Reportedly, Google even plans to do away with the need for a traditional PC altogether.

Google will do all this for us, and not charge consumers a penny. They even, through their chartiable arm Google.org, have ambitious plans to find alternative energy sources that will replace fossil fuels. Yes, it is trying to save the world.

Google’s products have become essential to many of our lives. How will the company continue to impact on us in the next few years? Its motto is: “Don’t be evil”. At the moment, the world seems to take them at their word. The question is: should we?

It must be remembered that Google can do all of this because of the masses of money it makes from the information we give it - 99 per cent of Google’s revenue is from advertising connected to its search engine.

Its search business is lucrative because it's so good at targeting the right adverts to the right person. Type in “pizza” and adverts for pizza chains come up. It is cost effective for the advertiser, as they pay Google only if someone clicks on the advert. And because Google controls over 80 per cent of the world’s internet searches, according to market reserachers Net Applications, people do click on these ads - in abundance. Thanks to our searches, a company which started life as a project between two Stanford university students little over ten years ago is now worth more than $107 billion (£72 billion).

So what will Google do with its gargantuan piles of cash?

One thing could be to fundamentally change the way we use computers, and as rumour would have it, just get rid of the PC altogether. Technology circles are abuzz with talk of Google’s most ambitious project yet: the GDrive - a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection. The company itself has refused to say anything about it but there is growing speculation that it will release the GDrive sometime this year, fuelled by the leak to a blog of some Google code referring to a GDrive as an “online file backup and storage” device.

(http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5678595.ece)