Hopeless Geek

There’s been some silly speculation as of late that Google’s grand plan is some web-based OS that does everything for everyone.

A bit too quacky if you ask me.

Google’s business is really rather obvious when you look at their offerings:

• Search for webpages
• Search for images (based on webpages)
• Search for Usenet posts
• Search for news articles
• Search for products (based on names and prices)
• Catalog websites (based on topic, results in better searches)
• Sell answers to questions (which are then indexed and available for searching)
• Search product catalogs
• Create and publish weblogs
• Translate webpages into other languages
• Find people

What do all of these have in common? Data mining. Mainly mining text, but also numbers and linking words to images and so on. The core point of Google is to mine data and do something, anything, with it. That’s the point of the company. Mine data about people and then hook them up. Mine data about sites and then list them together. Mine data about products and then show the relevant ones. Mine data about sites, cross-reference the images on the page, and then search for the images. Mine data about all the text available via TCP/IP and then serve up some ads for it that make sense to serve for that topic.

What does email have to do with this? Obviously, advertising is a blatant point on the map for it. Index the message, look for what’s similar, sell you something. Auntie Em got herself killed so you’re in the coffin business, right? Well, yeah, that’s where it could go wrong, eh? Never the less, same technologies as those baddies at the top of the page (that, now that I mention death, will start serving ads about coffins).

It’s just one more place to target ads, and it’s a great one. “Hey kid, mow the lawn!” and, suddenly, you get information on lawnmowers. In fact, if you tell Google where you are they might be able to tell you about lawn moving services in your area as well.

After all, it’s just data, and in the hands of data miners, it’s the breath of life into a new way of looking at it all … again. Take everything you know, mash it all together, sieve it, and serve it up all pretty-like.

Google is what Perl wants to be.