Gooooooooooogle

Google – the miraculous word...Google has reached basically every corner of this world and has been even integrated into our daily vocabulary. Nowadays people “google” for information in the world wide web – meaning: Google has become the synonym for obtaining information – actually for all online search engines. Even though there are other providers, no one has reached the same scale of success like this American Inc. It has clearly a monopoly position.

Google was founded in 1998 by the two “Google Guys” Larry Page and Sergey Brin and has experienced unbelievable boom. According to Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report Google is the “world's most valuable brand” (http://www.news.com.au/business/google-worlds-most-valuable-brand-millward-brown-optimor-survey-finds/story-e6frfm1i-1225859877377) - it is worth $US114 billion.

A crazy amount of money – 114 billion US Dollars, which are almost 93 billion Euros. Respect “Google Guys”, respect! But at the same time it is not surprising: they manage to reinvent themselves over and over again, and that is, I believe, one major key aspect in their self definition. One might thin to himself, it is only a search engine, what else can they offer, and how in the world can they make money of it?! Well, with never-ending new features, topics and endless products.

When thinking about Google, I guess many people have the same first association. Wow, even though I don't really understand what they are doing all day long, if I only could work for Google. At least that is how I react. Anyone who has ever seen pictures of Google offices all over the world or has heard that their employees are spoiled with Gourmet food every day or has read ratings about the happiest workers, shares my longing and knows that Google is a pretty good address to work in. So one more important point here – Google is a greenhouse for innovators. By supplying their employees all basic (and way beyond) needs, Google is making sure that they will all be focusing on one thing – Innovation.

If one tries to broaden one's own ignorance and narrowness and read about what Google is actually doing, one will find a pretty funny description about their technology published by Google themselves. They claim to have the fastest and most intelligent pigeons, who are picking words for every search entry. They go on by explaining exactly how the system “PigeonRank” (what might be more familiar to you as the PageRank) was developed, why it is so efficient and why the pigeons are smart. The final part, where they describe how they choose them, under which living conditions the birds are kept and how they estimate the future of this strategy, it gets funny. Here take a look yourselves: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

Until now everything that I wrote was rather positive – rather is probably an underestimation, ok – it is clearly an underestimation – Yes, I WANT TO WORK FOR GOOGLE. But when writing about them, I should stay as neutral as possible and also discuss shortly the criticism Google has experienced regarding its privacy settings.

A few months ago Google introduced its newest product – its answer to Facebook – called Buzz. Well, you all know my attitude towards Facebook already, so I guess I don't have to add all the critical points that I mentioned in my blog a few weeks ago. So Buzz is basically a social network that was about to reveal everything that gmail users were doing. “One problem that immediately caused concern was Google's decision to automatically give users a ready-made circle of friends based on the people they most frequently e-mailed. Unless users changed settings in their profile, this list could automatically be made public, allowing anyone to see who a user corresponded with most frequently.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8517613.stm) Not the best situation for a cheating wife or husband but surely also pretty problematic for e.g. Chinese opposition members. Not surprising, Google reacted fast to these critics and promised changes. Since I haven't used Buzz myself I cannot tell if it is true or not or better than Facebook or not. That leads us to the big question whether we really want Google to have so much information about us. Do we have a choice? Personally I dont see any problem with that and until now I was not effected by it (at least to my knowledge) but I would argue that if Google makes use of this information in making money it becomes more complicated, and perhaps not fair. S as I said, I would like to work or them one day so I will stop here and let you check this short movie. A bit to paranoid to my taste, you will be the judge of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNofb-OlZyQ

What I know is that we are all longing for exposing ourselves to everyone at every time – if it is with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Buzz – who cares. We spend hours and hours following other people's lives, “poking them” (whatever that means) or playing some weird farm game, which I hope does not have a negative impact on our IQ. In short, we spend too much time with these online networks or in the world wide web in general. And before I am starting to repeat myself again, I prefer getting to an end with this blog and spend a little time with my wife. Do the same or read a nice book for a change (: