Google is VERY successful and as such you & I are starting to question it's motives

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[Update #2] Well, DNA is "in" Google's product set: Google Takes Stake In Sergey’s Wife’s Biotech Company

[Update] Robert Schoble, an influential ex-Microsoft employee has posted a similar article title, DOG (Distruct/Disdain of Google) moves in. As well as his view he has links to to others that are 'questioning' the Google approach/business model although I don't hold with the Feedburner purchase is all evil as espoused by some.

We worry about the power that is coming with it's success.

Some worry so much that they now see conspiracy theories ... I don't, but I understand why others do. The best example is the MasterPlan: About the Power of Google

It postulates (word of the week?) that Google is not capturing information merely to offer up 'relevant' information services but it's working with the CIA to capture everything about a you and I, including DNA. But what the documentary doesn't offer up as a hypothesis is the answer to "Why?"

My view - Google is doing it's thing in order to:
  1. Get as much info* available to the people
  2. To try and make the info relevant to the person receiving it
  3. Leverage Use that 'relevant' delivery to make $$$s
Everyone seems happy and glad that Google can deliver #1.
Then again, probably anyone (Microsoft, Yahoo! ...) can do the same now-a-days with eye to the 'universal search' just released that may have moved the goal posts on Google's competition.

The fact that Google makes squillions out of it doesn't seem to be a problem either - we all are enamoured by the Googernaut and it's fantastical quarterly results.

And finally, everyone seems to want number 2 (make the info relevant).
However the 'payment' for increased relevancy is giving up a lot about yourself and that may be too much for some. The personal decision about this 'cost' isn't necessarily about the 'giving up of myself' and more an internal/emotional batltle around, "What are they going to do with it?"
And that comes down to 'trust' - how much do I trust Google** with my 'self'.

Trust has to be earned, it has to be built upon and it has to be a two way path. However it's very rarely total and all the way to the bottom. I trust my friends with a lot more than I trust the readers of this blog (sorry, it's true) and the effect of that is that I share a lot more of 'me' with my friends that you all. I trust Liz with even more and down we go, peeling away the onion of Mike.

As Google wants more and more of us then we'll probably hear an ever increasing and louder set of voices asking, "How much do you trust Google?"


* Info is not just web pages and it includes all the methods of how we perceive information - moving pictures, spacial relationships, sound (particularly speech) and any other ways I've missed off. Knowing this moves your perception, I hope, of Google away from merely a 'web page search engine'.

** It's interesting that I and most others talk about Google as the entity and that we have a relationship with Google and not, say Eric Schmidtt (CEO) or either of the two founders. I believe this has been a deliberate strategy from day one and is supported by the policy of people dealing with the computer and not a 'support desk'.
However Google has to be seen as 'being human' and the clever use of the corporate blogs has enabled that - it's a corporate that lets us see inside and view the worker bees rushing around and that they are human like us. However we can't build a relationship with them, that can only occur with the entity called Google.

Hat-tip to Tim at simple and loveable

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