May 20th, 2007
How Google will get inside YOUR head
Why does Google become even more “valuable” day after day? That is not the $64,000 question, it is the $150 billion market cap question.
The Google CEO has the answer: “Network Effect,” big time.
The more information that goes into the “search” network, the more valuable it becomes, Eric Schmidt said in his Personal Democracy keynote Friday in NYC.
SEE: Google CEO Schmidt on ‘Personal Democracy’: Up For Sale and Google sweet talks its way to political power
When Schmidt says the MORE information the better, he really means it.
The Google CEO takes his corporate “mission” to organize, ie. control, all the world’s information, literally. I heard him declare his interest in the “personal information” of all the world’s inhabitants at the San Jose search conference last summer:
“If you think about it, all the world’s information includes personal information. Personal information is held in online word processing, online spreadsheets, online calendar, online email.”
Friday, I heard Schmidt on his plans for all the personal information Google garners:
“With the personal version of Google, iGoogle, the computer will get to know you so well, it will say good morning, you are late this morning, but you are always late; It will almost understand how you think and mimic behavior.”
Not only will Google “understand” and “mimic” everyone, it will be everyone’s “friend.”
SEE: Google gets VERY personal: Can we be friends?
But what about all those “unfriendly” searchers at Google, the ones that do NOT want Google to try and “understand” them or “mimic” them?
Are NON iGoogle users safe from Google’s prying eyes? Of course NOT.
I heard the Google point man on Enterprise Search underscore Wednesday just how much Google knows about each and every single search that transpires at Google.
SEE: Google to big business: Google love belongs in the Enterprise! and Is Google Enterprise Search a joke?
Kevin Gough, Product Manager, lamented at the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC that enterprise IT is “losing the inovation race” to consumer services, such as Google, YouTube, MySpace.
Why are existing, mission critical business applications behind the consumer times? Because they reside behind the pesky “firewall in the enterprise,” Gough asserts. Therefore, according to Gough: the enterprise doesn’t know “what is going on.”
Google is not in the consumer dark though, Gough underscored, because Google knows at all times how users are “voting with their clicks”: We have “more data” everytime someone clicks, he noted.
Gough extolled the Google “real time feedback loop.”
BUT, should every single action of unsuspecting Google users really be feeding the Google data mining machine? NO!
In Google privacy jungle: Where is YOUR data? Don’t ask! I analyze why there is NO justifiable reason for Google to “spy” on all the world’s mouse clicks.
