Google is getting fed something or the other, a million times per second. Every educated person on this planet is feeding it. We all want to search something on Google, many times a day. Kids know they can find anything on Google. So does my totally non-computer savvy dad. He knows he can search for any kind of stuff on Google. Billions of people use this search engine regularly.
Now these are a lot of people using Google, not counting the other 20 Google services, like Gmail or Buzz, just Google Search.
We all are giving Google a new ‘thought’ information. This collective information may be totally unknown in the past decade, but due to the coming of FB/Twitter, we all know what real time ‘trending’ is. When suddenly some odd topic becomes really hot. Like recently when Google itself was in the news for pulling out of China, or when Lady GaGa’s new ‘TELEPHONE’ video was premiering, we could see for ourselves the trending spike on twitter, and of course, Google could see the spike in search. These search spikes has made Google come out with ‘FLU TRENDS’ which tracks tell tale searches to know which parts of the world have got flu contamination.
Last year Michael Jackson passed away, and even Google didn’t know what to do with the super-duper search spike for him, and thought it was a spam attack.
Google has in it’s hands a new kind of ‘thought’ currency that it is beginning to realize the value of only in recent years. The rich and the powerful Governments would kill for such a huge information PULSE. You have thousands of ‘signals’ coming from all parts of the world, all the time. What are people thinking, in New York, in Sydney, what is going on in peoples minds? Whatever it is, we only thought it knows what we, as individuals search. But they just don’t see our search, they see everybody’s google search, and can know about search trends, moods, fears, secrets, and problems/solutions like no one else can. The real power is the ‘collective thought’ pulse and it is the emerging currency that is going to dominate the future. It’s more than just eyeballs, this is truly interactive and intuitive, along with being totally real time.
Another factor is that Google is so omnipresent. It has embedded itself in cellphones, iphones, droids, Google phones, netbooks, almost everywhere. It wants people to use it, to feed to it what they are thinking, all the time. No matter how personal or intimate a search is, Google is filing it and indexing it, trending it, geo-locating it, and comparing it with other searches.
So much information to one single company who has already monetized it through advertising, using sophisticated and automatic online tools like ad-words/ad-sense.
Google has been fair though, and does offer some insight to what it finds, through Google TRENDS, and Google INSIGHT. But in a few years the value of the thought pulse is going to increase manifold, and the Governments can kill for such valuable information about the masses.
Such information can effect elections, marketing campaigns, and even cause big disruptions in sensitive countries like the middle east and China.
A totally new, super valuable currency of the future in the hands of one company?
Vikram
neoviky 