So here’s the scenario. Its Friday night, I’m just one of the millions of zombie like figures in front of their computer screens which has all the usual pages opened up, you know....orkut, blogspot, youtube, gmail, etc, etc ….it’s while deleting those annoying spam mails that it actually hit me...everything I was using was owned or controlled in someway by google….all google…..google, google, google …a word you’re going to hear a lot in the following article so get used to it.Google, a word synonym with knowledge, information and money, the impact that the brand has had on the present generation since its inception in 1998 is staggering. We no longer search the internet, we "google it”, because a simple "Google search” brings back almost two billion sites. No wonder google was included into the oxford dictionary in 2006. However what most people don’t really realize is how much power the company actually has over the general public. But before we start the random paranoia, let’s take a look back at the history of the phenomenon known as google. Formed by probably the two biggest geeks on the planet, Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in the science program at Stanford and soon dropped out of school to start Google from a friends' garage. A decade later, Brin now serves as president of technology at Google while Page heads product division with an estimated net worth of $18 billion each. It’s easy to understand what drew us to this search engine, with its decorated landing page logo, in the first place. Google totally understood us, what we meant or what we wanted even when we couldn’t spell it ourselves: “Do you mean “Prisoner of Azkaban?” Why yes, Google! Yes I do! They learned by watching Microsoft just how far you can push before you are broken up by the government. Google knows where its bread is buttered… It’s all about putting as many ads in front of people as possible. That’s where the so called ‘evil’ of google started. Even though google makes donations of upwards of $200 million to Mozilla per year and Mozilla innocently enough picks google as its default search engine in Firefox. But that’s probably because the other search engines don’t measure up right? Right….Then there are the claims that google reads all the mails in your gmail account. But surely that couldn’t be happening, it’s probably just a coincidence that the ads that pop up in your gmail always have something to do with your mail info. I’m sure two Mensa geniuses with billions of dollars at their disposal couldn’t possibly hack into your account. Moving on, if you’re an average Joe like me, who hits google for his daily need for information, one thing you probably should know is that google stores all your information indefinitely,whether you like it or not….don’t believe me? , ask the 17 different privacy rights cases currently pending against google in the courts. That’s where things start to get interesting. Through acquisitions of a few thousands of the world’s best engineers available, the company knows more about you than you might be aware of. Google originally placed a cookie on each user's computer, which can be used to track that person's search history and that cookie was not set to expire until 2038. Though google claimed that these were necessary to maintain user preferences and give users a better experience, evidence has turned up suggesting that Google turns over all information to the FBI or the NSA causing web nerds all over the world to cry foul.
In lieu of this information and my ever present desire to do something stupid, I decided to perform an experiment, one in which I would boycott everything google related from my life for as long as possible. In the 20 minutes that I lasted I realized two very important things…
(1) How annoying minesweeper gets after a while and,
(2)I can’t imagine my life without google!
Despite all my bad mouthing, all my tirades against the big evil corporation, I’m just as addicted to google as any of you out there. I mean it; it wouldn’t be possible to function in day to day life without it. Anything imaginable is present on here within the time it takes to click a button. If it is online, Google has it. I admit it; I am a slave to google!! I’m a slave to YouTube, Orkut, google video, google street view, google maps, google earth, Blogspot, google mail, Picasa ….and anything else they might have bought in the last 5mins. How can you not love a company that spends amounts per day, which could possibly run a small African country, voraciously acquiring every worthwhile thing on the Internet?
Going by the latest news on google, after the release of their operating system google chrome, google is all set to make public their very own google PC fully equipped with google applications and an android operating system which could very well take over the Iphone market as well. This comes just weeks after their acquisition of popular content site Digg and claims of release of an information medium ‘Knol’ which could possibly replace the beloved Wikipedia…unthinkable I know! Though their representatives have repeatedly assured the public that google hasn’t bought out competitor’s yahoo (yet), it does nothing to stop the rumors that google is slowly but surely taking over. All we can do now I guess is hang along for the ride and pray for our continued existence on this Google Earth.
(Information courtesy Google).
