Google takes its name from the mathematical term "googol," which stands for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, a number said to be greater than the sum of all the particles in the universe. Obviously few of us, save perhaps a handful of farsighted astronomers, have need for a word that conveys so much.
You can't say the same for Google. If it continues to double profits every year for the next hundred, accountants a century from now might need to represent the company's gross revenue in googols.
Media Hack
In less than a decade, the company has evolved from an algorithm to a search phenomenon to a verb. Google introduced an ad-free homepage and clutter-free interface, speedier downloads and more "relevant" results. In the process, it redefined the look and feel of the internet. When conventional wisdom held that search was little more than a free add-on for portals, Google figured out a way to make money from it. Paid search advertising accounts for $1.24 billion of the $1.25 billion Google took in last quarter.
On its way to wresting control of our desktops, Microsoft once asked, "Where do you want to go today?" Now Google provides the answer.
The problem is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the geeks who coded Google from the algorithm on up, are inserting themselves into our lives. They wish to accompany us everywhere, forever. They want us to see the world through Google-colored glasses.
They can do this because Google has a grip on the interface. When we boot up and get online we hardly notice that Google dispatches a cookie set to expire in 35 years. Then Google filters our reality, dictates our aesthetic, collates and catalogs our memories, chooses what information we mine. The Google experience becomes a collective Rorschach test, which shapes our worldview and affects who we are and what we will become.
Some view Google as a media company. It isn't, because it doesn't create its own content. Rather it repurposes and repackages pre-existing material. Google is really little more than a content syndicator, a broker that makes money through information arbitrage.
Once any of us Google an old classmate, scan the day's headlines at Google News, use Froogle to comparison shop, seek direction from Google Maps, review academic books and scholarly papers, we strike an implicit agreement.
In exchange for free access to Google's resources, Google gets to fire advertisements at us from every conceivable angle. Google even gets to read our e-mail so it can customize our ad viewing experience. The beneficiaries: Google, its advertisers and ad affiliates.
This type of targeted search ad is all the rage, and as a result, Google has become the eyes and ears for millions of web surfers.
But Google won't stop there. It is hatching plans for an online payment system that would compete with PayPal, which led Robert Hof of BusinessWeek to write: "Another day, another new Google service that threatens to torpedo yet another outfit's business model." The company also recently encroached on Microsoft's turf with a desktop search function, which Google claims is "how our brains would work if we had photographic memories."
It struck deals to scan millions of volumes of books from the New York Public Library, University of Michigan, Stanford and Oxford, and filed several patent applications for a technology that would rank news stories on the basis of relevance, accuracy and reliability. (One wonders how Google will judge what is newsworthy.)
All of this reminds of me of two chilling comments courtesy of Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil," and "We are moving to a Google that knows more about you."
Taken together, what do they mean?
The company won't say. But Google's attitude seems to be that it knows what's best for you. It's why Google is big, bad, ubiquitous, and whipping Microsoft, the dominatrix of the desktop.
I'm not the paranoid type. I don't watch a baseball game, see the catcher signaling the pitcher, and think they are discussing me. But I do wonder what impact Google's power will have on our culture.
I'm not the only who isn't gaga about Google. Daniel Brandt, who operates Google Watch, believes the problem is that Google has "no awareness of (its) responsibility to the public sphere. Geeks rule, libertarianism is cool, and the only thing governments do is meddle and regulate. That's the way Google sees the world."
Brandt is so vociferous in his hatred for Google that he inspired a hazing site -- Google-Watch-Watch, created by a Google lover who drank the Kool-Aid.
Nevertheless Brand has a point: He is concerned how Google plans to use the information it gets out of us. Will it cave every time the government comes bearing a subpoena? Can it be trusted to safeguard our personal information? All Google will promise is that it "will provide notice before any personally identifying information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy."
The googol, explains Wikipedia, is "of no particular significance in mathematics, nor does it have any practical uses." It was created "to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in mathematics teaching."
In this way Google has become far bigger than the googol.
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Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and the assistant director of the Business and Economic Reporting program in the department of journalism.
