Friday, June 24, 2005
Beware the Google Threat.
Yes, Google may be powerful on a large scale, but to err is only human.
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Just a random thought after reading so many articles about the future prospects of Google network.
Because there are so many search engines that users use to search for different types of items, for e.g., Google Maps provide you with a 2D map along with driving directions and (in many instances) a zoomable satellite image of your destination when you key in the starting and ending addresses; Google Scholar yields results on papers on a topic by a certain university professor; Answers.com works very well for a quick word definition, a biography, or an explanation of how something works; Shopping.com or Become.com for smarter shopping choices; Technorati.com for latest blog updates; wikipedia.com for encyclopedic definitions and BitTorrent provides search results ranked by popularity based on number of seeders and overall amount of data transferred, so Google can expand what it has already got now into a wider range of different categories of search-ware.
So in addition to Google Maps and Google Scholar, Google Video, Google Ride Finder and Google Suggest, maybe they can consider Google Blogs (hang on, this is certainly possible, cos Blogger was bot over by Google not too long ago); Google Music for users to search for information relevant to music/lyrics etc; Google Travel for travelling tips/info; Google Games; Google Technology, Google Dictionary; Google Books (hmm, there were indeed plans to scan thousands of books from the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford Universities and the Google Library Project).
Actually what I suggested above are most likely plans Google has in mind long time ago, and the engineers are prolly busy researching and experimenting on such possibilities. Either that, or they are in the process of buying over other kinds of search engine. Foresight is certainly what the Google experts possess.
While Google's future bears unlimted possibilites for users like us, serious ramifications cannot be ignored too. Just a friendly reminder: always be careful of what you type/write/blog, it may come back and haunt you in the most unexpected manner.
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