Google has had a busy time. In the past month, it has announced what appeared to be a pointless deal with Sun Microsystems, launched an RSS feed reader, applied to supply free city-wide Wi-Fi in San Francisco, got sued by the Association of American Publishers over its Google Print initiative to digitise libraries, accidentally unveiled its Google Base database product, and floated the idea of taking over the advertising business.
At this stage, Google could be turning its impressive and extremely profitable search franchise into a powerful portal based on innovative, interworking web-based software. This is what Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN are doing. Instead, it is dabbling with a wide spectrum of unrelated and apparently incidental playground projects.
But, perhaps I’m looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps Google isn’t turning from a search company into one that delivers a suite of useful web-based applications. Perhaps it really is more interested in turning into an advertising behemoth that knows enough about you to target you with ads.
This change in perception has been triggered partly by the leaking of Google Base, which seems to be a classified advertising vehicle, among other things. There’s been fevered speculation that it could wipe out everything from Craigslist to Monster and eBay.
Either way, The New York Times ran a big story pointing out that this year Google will sell $6-billion-worth of ads, which is more than is sold by any United States newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network.
Obviously, Google already sells ads for a huge number of websites, but, says the paper, ”now it is preparing to extend its technology to nearly every other medium, most significantly television. It is looking toward a world of digital cable boxes and internet-delivered television that will allow it to show commercials tailored for each viewer, as it does now for each web page it displays.”
So, if you search Google for information about washing machines before going to the New York Times site (ads supplied by Google), you can presumably expect to see ads for washing machines next to the sports coverage, and ads for washing machines when you turn on your TV.
If you ever search for things such as Britney Spears nude, penis-extension technologies or treatments for haemorrhoids, better stop now. Google is logging your searches already.
I just hope that while Google is paying attention to the results-based personalisation of advertising, it isn’t neglecting its non-search efforts. Gmail e-mail and Google Maps are excellent, and Google Talk represents a good start. However, some of its offerings are lacklustre at best — the feed reader, personalised home page and Orkut social network are obvious examples. The Google Directory based on Dmoz, the Open Directory Project, is worse than lacklustre.
Aside from this variable quality, Google doesn’t seem to have any coherent goal. Too many of its programs don’t even seem to be aware of each other’s existence — Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, Orkut and Google Maps, for example.
And finally, Google still tends to launch services in the US only, often with limited or no support for non-Microsoft products or for alternative platforms. Yes, it makes sense to target the mass market: it’s where the money is. But Google is now a giant multinational corporation with billions in the bank, not a tiny start-up. It should be able to launch programs that support multiple browsers, multiple operating systems and multiple languages.
Google is now in the happy position that it can get massive amounts of publicity for whatever it does. But fail to deliver, and what publicity helped build, it will happily tear down. — Guardian Unlimited Â