What is this?
Google’s original
mission remains intact: to use search to organise the web’s information. We
enter what we’re looking for, click ‘Google Search’, and Google, almost
instantly, scours the web.
It uses a rather
impressive algorithm called PageRank – named after co-founder Larry Page –
which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of
documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its
relative importance within the set (Wikipedia).
In the world of
PageRank, websites ‘vote’ for, rather than link to, one another. The importance
of a site is measured through a combination of the number of votes received,
and the number of votes received by the sites its votes came from.
Why should I care?
There is far more to
the Google story. Delving deeper, it becomes clear that there is a whole load
of functionality – and controversy – lurking beneath the surface.
Google could well
play a bigger part in your life, now or in the future, than you might expect.
Google is becoming so
ubiquitous that the company is often accused of spying on us, not just in terms
of what we’re searching, but in the real, physical world. Google Street View was
subject to plenty of bad publicity earlier this year because its “360-degree
panoramic street-level views” (Wikipedia) have been deemed a breach of privacy.
The ‘absolutely
everywhere’ nature of Google inevitably raises questions about online privacy
too. Google has the capability, though not necessarily the inclination, to
store data about our internet use.
But one of Google’s
great positives is its wide range of features (this is just a small sample):
This means a large
chunk of our online activity converges with Google at some point. But it is
that functionality which makes Google far more than a search engine.
Any social media
benefits?
Most importantly, I’m
a big fan of Google Reader. Before pitching bloggers or even blogging
effectively, it’s essential to read. The
easiest way to familiarise ourselves with the content out there which interests
us is through that wonderful creation, RSS. And it just so happens that Google
Reader is regarded by me – and a whole bunch of far more influential and wise
digi-folk – as one of the best readers available. It allows us to manage,
search and read RSS feeds easily, and share and annotate them.
Google is also active
in the blogging space. Its Blog Search is useful for social media professionals
as a supplement to Technorati, for
example, but we can also blog through Google – in fact I do, regularly. Blogger is a popular blogging platform which
Google bought in 2003, and is a great starting point for novice bloggers.
Two of Google’s other
major purchases, Picasa and YouTube are also social beasts. The former enables
photo sharing, the latter video. It doesn’t get much more social than sharing
such rich content around friends and family.
Any issues I should know about?
Google gets a lot
of bad press about data use and privacy, so that’s something to think about.
Google does some things
very well: their search is such that ‘to Google’ is a commonly used verb, and
Google Reader’s rather wonderful. But Picasa, Talk and Google Mail all stand
out as products with plenty of competition.
Google is possibly
well on the way to providing viable cloud computing. Before
that becomes possible, we need to have reliable and effective methods. Google’s
made a start, along with competitors in some cases. Picasa enables us to store
and share photos, and Google Docs does the same for documents. Calendar, Mail
and Notebook can also be seen in the same light.
How much does it cost?
Zip. Google has
amassed its vast fortune in a variety of ways, but extracting cash from the
everyday web user is not one of them.
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