What's Google Up To?

As you know if you read my newsletter, the StratVantage News Summary , I am now a Google business partner, having taken their coin to the tune of a righteous $9.47 since I started offering AdSense ads on the Website version of this newsletter. As part of the deal, I had to agree not to "engage in any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google's reputation or goodwill."

Despite that, I have to ask, "What the heck is Google up to?"

They just announced free Wi-Fi for everyone in San Francisco. Prior to that, they announced Google Secure Access, a free Virtual Private Network service for anyone with any Wi-Fi connection. They recent bought a stealthy startup that purports to be working on wireless applications. And they bought Keyhole, which they turned into Google Earth.

Are they out to rule the world?

To find out, let's take a look at what these various recent moves have in common. They all are pieces of an advertising puzzle so brilliantly nefarious that you just couldn't call it evil. But first, a look at the facts.

• Google is the world's most-used search engine
• They make most of their money from advertising (in a very non-evil way!)
• They launched Google Local, which allows for location-specific searches, in February 2005
• Their Gmail service allows them to scan your email for keywords so they can advertise to you
• Google Desktop search and Picasa allow you to index everything on your hard drive, and communicate some information back to Google
• Google Personal History/Personalized Search service allows you to store your searching history on Google's servers for later access
• Their Google Secure Access service sets up a Virtual Private Network connection between your wireless laptop and Google's proxy server. That means all your traffic is secure. It also means all your traffic flows through Google's server, where it is decrypted and sent out on the Internet. Google also has an application called Google Web Accelerator, which does much the same thing.

Here are some more facts. First, excerpts from Google Secure Access' terms of service:

• Google may log some information from your web page requests as may the websites that you visit.
  
  
• Google Secure Access does not log cookies and strips potentially sensitive query data from the end of requests to help better protect your privacy.
  
  
• Google also logs a small set of non-personally identifiable information -- such as routing information, session durations and operating system and Google Secure Access client version numbers -- in order to create your Google Secure Access connection, understand how people are using Google Secure Access and help us maintain the Google Secure Access client.
  
  
• Google will not sell or provide personally identifiable information to any third parties except under the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy.
  
  
• If Google concludes that we are required by law or have a good faith belief that collection, preservation or disclosure of additional information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, our users or the public, such as if we believe the Google Secure Access service is being abused, we may for a limited period of time preserve additional internet traffic or other information.

And here are Google Privacy Policy excerpts:

• We may store and process personal information collected on our site in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using our services, you consent to the transfer of your information among these facilities, including those located outside your country.
  
  
• We may share aggregated information with others. Examples of this include the number of users who searched for "Mars Rover" or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement.
  
  
• Google may present links in a format that enables us to understand whether they have been followed. We use this information to understand and improve the quality of Google's search technology. For instance, this data helps us determine how often users are satisfied with the first result of a query and how often they proceed to later results.

Next, excerpts from Google's Gmail terms of use:

• Because we keep back-up copies of data for the purposes of recovery from errors or system failure, residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account [italics mine].
  
  
• Information displayed or clicked on in your Gmail account (including UI elements, ads, links, and other information) is also recorded.

Finally, excerpts from Google Desktop's terms of use:

• If you choose to enable Advanced Features, Google Desktop may send information about the websites that you visit to provide enhanced Google Desktop functions, such as personalizing news displayed in Sidebar.
  
  
• Enabling Advanced Features also allows Google Desktop to collect a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and send it to Google. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do and the time it takes for you to see your results, and application reports we'll use to make the program better.
  
  
• Your copy of Google Desktop includes a unique application number. When you install Google Desktop, this number and a message indicating whether the installation succeeded is sent back to Google so that we can make the software work better.

Here are yet more facts – a list of Google's acquisitions over the years, courtesy of Adam Rifkin's blog, Wikipedia, and Kuro5hin.

2/2001: Deja – back in the day, there was, and still is, a threaded discussion service called USENET originally created by two Duke grad students back in nineteen-seventy-freakin'-nine; Deja archived 500 million messages, pretty much back to the beginning of the commercial Internet in 1995, and ran the Deja News service; Google bought the archive and turned it into Google Groups

9/2001: Outride - a spin-off of Xerox PARC–developers of state-of-the-art model-based search relevance technology

2/2003: Pyra Labs – creator of Blogger blogging software–content for the Google machine – the better to advertise to you

4/2003: Neotonic Software – e-mail customer support

4/2003: Applied Semantics (formerly known as Oingo) – domain name, contextual advertising and enterprise search solutions; most important for Google: technology that understands, organizes and extracts information from Web sites, built in to their AdSense product, to which I am now thrall

9/2003: Kaltix – personalized search to possibly replace or fix PageRank, which may have been broken in part by Google Bombing by bloggers! See the explanation behind the fact that President Bush's biography at whitehouse.gov is the first entry if you type the single word "failure" into Google. (It's number 4 on MSN Search and Yahoo, number 2 on Excite and Dumbfind, 7 on AltaVista, not mentioned on Hotbot or Lycos, and is replaced by Michael Moore's home page on the AOL version of Google, I kid you not!)

10/2003: Sprinks – advertising company that provided ads for Google competitors About.com, Metacrawler.com, and Mamma.com

10/2003: Genius Labs – a Boston-based blogging entity comprised entirely of a guy named Biz Stone; Stone resigned from Google last month.

4/2004: Ignite Logic – provides Web templates for law firms and other small businesses

6/2004: Baidu – Google bought part of Baidu, China's biggest independent Internet search engine

7/2004: Picasa – desktop photo management/storage/search  

10/2004: Keyhole – view 3D images of any place on earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest; became Google Earth

2004: Zipdash – mobile/traffic/mapping company – now working with Google Maps; technology used to develop and launch Google Ride Finder

2004: Where2 – mapping software provider –Australian mapping company mentioned in the 2004 annual report, but not much is known about it. It also had something to do with Google Maps.

3/2005: Urchin – Web analytics company – tools that optimize content and track marketing performance

4/2005: Dodgeball – a two-person cell phone social networking/SMS meetup service – the service can provide you with addresses and directions in major cities; also has flash mob capabilities

7/2005: Akwan Information Technologies – Latin American search company in technology of search as a part of its plan to open an R&D office and expand its presence into Latin and South America.

8/2005: Android Inc. – mysterious mobile software provider

So what is Google up to with all these acquisitions? Perhaps we can glean a little of their direction by examining their 10 Things manifesto. Listed as things Google has found to be true, they form the DNA of the company:

The only one of these principles that I see them violating in their acquisition strategy is number 2, It's best to do one thing really, really well. Yet, depending on where they're going, these acquisitions may add up to doing one thing; it's just not limited to what we think Google is doing today as a search engine. Their S-1 filing for their Initial Public Offering (IPO) states: "Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. . . Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Now let's look at the parts of the machine Google is building.

1. Google has a killer advertising engine, also known as their search engine. They charge to deliver users to Websites, whose owners pay by the click. This ad engine represents the lion's share of Google's revenue.

2. Google has a killer way to locate and even image every business and residence in the US, and soon the world. Further, they are developing services to allow people to meet based on location, and could thus advertise based on location.

3. Google is working on the magic triangle of Internet success: Commerce, Content, and Community.

4. Google has many ways to personally identify your interests, wants, and needs – through Google Personalized search, the cookie they set in your browser (AKA the mark of the beast), and the statistics they gather through Google Desktop and Picasa
   
   
5. Google has plans to offer free Wi-Fi access to the Internet in San Francisco, driving more users to its servers where their desires can be known

So what are they going to do with this machine? Here's what I think we'll see within the next few years:

• Nationwide free Wi-Fi sponsored by Google's ads and secured by Google Secure Access
  
  
• Google will increase their ability to know what you want by tracking searches, by tracking all access through their free Wi-Fi service, and by tracking what you're searching for on your own computer via Google Desktop
  
  
• Google will figure out how to make Froogle a killer eCommerce destination and may even spawn their own PayPal-like payment system, possibly involving cell phone-based payments
  
  
• Google will extend further into cell phones, powering social networking applications in order to achieve one of the holy grails of advertising: location-based ads. Google will be able to find you wherever you are and offer ads and coupons based on your location, tastes, and interests.
  
  
• Google will release a Linux-based operating system combined with Sun's OpenOffice running on cheap hardware and featuring Application Service Provider (ASP) applications hosted on Google servers. Of course, this offering will track user behavior.
  
  
• Google will build its Website analytics business and its Google Enterprise business to further integrate into the structure of the Web. There may be wink-wink agreements on how taking these services will improve one's PageRank.
  
  
• Google will improve or replace its PageRank service, which has come under criticism
  
  
• Google will expand its hegemony worldwide by buying, investing in, or out-competing any offshore competitors.

In other words, Google is building a system to know exactly what you want and deliver as much of it to you as it can wherever you are.

Let's detail who will be hurt by the creation of this system: Internet Service Providers, Wi-Fi network providers (hey!), other search engines (natch), eCommerce sites, online retailers, cell phone users (hello, ads!), fledgling location-based advertising services, Microsoft, PC manufacturers (cheapo GooglePCs), Website analytics firms, and possibly, people who value their privacy.

Is Google trying to take over the world? You decide. But it's a mighty good thing these guys promise not to be evil – although they have refused to talk to CNet for printing an article containing sensitive information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt – information that ironically was obtained via Google searches. That actually sounds a little bit evil. In fact, the New York Times thinks Google may be replacing Microsoft as the huge corporation people love to hate.

So hang on to your privacy, if you can, and stay tuned.