This virtual environment is very real

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, computer revolution, companies

Hmmm, let's see what I've used today. Of course, I do most of my searching with Google, often starting from an iGoogle page when I'm logged in. I've used Google Maps to see how close a certain hotel is to one of the Septa rail stations in Philly; searched Google Images to find a good pic for a presentation (preferably at a .gov site so it has no copyright); updated a Knol I've been writing; and now I'm using Blogger. This is just the first half of my day. I may use Google Earth later (trying to find seafloor scars of trawling…maybe the supposed Atlantis is unique); there is a chance I'll do a patent search, though I have professionals to call on for that; and at home this evening I am as likely to use Chrome as Firefox and I may fire up Picasa if I have time.

I wonder how many people bother to click the "more" button at the top of the Google search page. For me it is easier to state what I haven't used: Shopping, Groups, Calendar and Finance.

The last button on this list opens up a big page full of offerings (not all unique, by the way), which I've shrunk by half for the image below.

Randall Stross has researched the Google revolution for his book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. (I toyed with titling this post "The Audacity of Google", but decided to leave such conceits to our Socialist-in-Chief.)

Google's unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil." So far, most people have given them the benefit of the doubt. While Google has about 70% of the searching action, it is also becoming dominant in video (with two offerings) and digitized books. Its principals make no bones about their desire to index everything that is digital and to digitize (and index) everything that isn't. The famous PageRank™ Algorithm ("THE Algorithm") produces the index that makes Google Search so popular. Its power results from the completeness of the collection on which it is based: a trillion web pages so far.

At the other end of the spectrum, Google Books is the first major salvo in Google's attempt to get everything into digital form. They've already gotten a couple million titles digitized, but copyright issues often mean that you can get only a glimpse into a book's content, and must follow a link or two to find the book at a bookstore or library. They have the best nationwide library search method I've used. Company spokesmen are candid that the entire project is long term; they claim it will take 300 years (not just for books, but for "everything").

Supporting all of this are some very big data centers. A typical center cost $600 million to build and equip, and they are located near power plants to minimize power line losses. They suck down electricity like a steel mill. Google's investment in these centers is approaching $4 billion. That's a lot of disk space; their first terabyte cost nearly $20,000. Today a 1Tb disk costs less than $100 (I just gave one to my son). The Google datastore is measured in Petabytes, or thousands of Tb.

This reminds me of an old joke: IBM invents a disk with literally infinite capacity, called the God Drive. The Government orders two. These days, I suspect Google has more storage capacity than anyone. I suspect they're close to an Exabyte.

This capacity and completeness has made Google Translations, which is statistical rather than rule-based, work better and more consistently than nearly all others, nearly all of the time. When you have a few trillion words and word combinations as a basis, the statistics of even obscure expressions become meaningful, and therefore parseable.

Google is not yet quite the size of Microsoft (Its market cap is ~70% of Microsoft's), but it has equaled IBM and surpassed Coca-Cola, and its market cap is bigger than three of the five largest oil companies. Its primary source of revenue is still the ads on its search results pages. Some enterprises, such as Books or YouTube, seem to be more like loss leaders.

As the author reports, Google wants to be an environment that we never exit. Of course, every business would like to have such ultimate customer loyalty. Over the years, cinderblock entities such as Sears and Wal-Mart have been "the place for everything you need", and in the online world, Alta Vista and then Yahoo vied with Microsoft for the title.

Google has gone farther than all of them. Looking at this menu of offerings (click for a more readable image), the items I see lacking are Travel, Job Listings, and Real Estate (among things I use with some frequency).

Can Google become the place we never leave? They have yet to face the kind of trust-busting challenge faced by Microsoft and others. I wonder when one will come. Until then, do you know what is another term for Conspiracy? Business Plan.