October 16th, 2006
Revenge of the Google nerds
Worth reading: Philipp Lenssen just posted a great piece on Google Blogoscoped with his ruminations on the giant cloud we know as Google is heading. Here are a few excerpts:
Google is the revenge of the nerds, tackling the world as an engineering problem, whose original PageRank algorithm no one wanted to buy. Even their organizational structure is another engineering problem, ready for analysis, logic, and the flow of rules. Research and development will always be their focus, and that means to think far into the future… where Artificial Intelligence, not stupid programs, answer users. The Googlebot, with a little training in Google’s AI labs, will slowly but inevitably start preparing for the Turing test.
We think Google thinks big, but they think bigger. Have you heard the sci-fi story of the city traffic lights that suddenly started to blink in weird rhythm ’cause the big city network had been growing so complex, it developed its own consciousness? Well, as opposed to the people in the sci-fi story, who I’m sure were taken by surprise, Google is desperately waiting for the day their millions of machines will talk back to them. What they can’t invent in algorithms themselves, they’ll allow to evolve on its own by scaling up the network.
Google loves the user and will do everything they can to please them (that’s usability to ya, and Google does a lot of quality testing, and they don’t want to let users wait, not even longer than you can blink your eye). But boy, they also love making money, and lots of it. The two go hand in hand right now so why worry much… not being evil is easy when being good is the selfish thing to be anyway. Only when the two clash, and it’s aiming to reach most users vs being good, then Google’s brains go into an infinite loop, like a robot you’ve asked a human question, and soon you’ll see lots of smoke everywhere… and there’s a nasty smell, too, like the big dark smoke cloud that appeared over China earlier this year. My prrrrecious market share…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
