If you happen to have a fairly large landed property, and haven’t been able to check for sometime what has grown in the northeast corner of your garden, head straight to Google Maps.
Chance is you’ll get the latest image of the spot and can bark instructions to your startled estate manager if necessary sitting 800 miles away.
If you feel that is a welcome relief, think again. True, Google’s maps are not real-time pictures, but that is hardly any consolation. If you are doing something in your yard in supposedly complete privacy, it may shock you later to know that all that while you are being pictured from heavens.
Well, Google is surely ‘heavens’ for us, for apparently one or other ‘online part’ of ours is in the hands of the search giant. If you’re prone to find anything online that you know you won’t find anywhere, there is good enough possibility that you’ve visited Google.
But surfers are not the only tribe to account for Google’s omnipresence. A whopping 73% of the budgets of companies that advertise on search engines go to Google as against 21% and 6% for Yahoo and Microsoft.
Further, advertisers are known to convert more from ads in Google, and surprisingly sell more as well compared to the other search biggies. For them AdWords is like the bible they won’t let go.
Google is mammoth and it knows it. Through its blogs and other web stories it attempts to wear a veil of camaraderie and friendliness, but in reality Google is as cold and hard as steel, spring-coiled to jump at and devour any online opportunity.
For most of us, it matters very little that Google is an overwhelming entity. What instead matters is that our small destinies are entwined with the behemoth in more ways than one.
For me Google is the succor in such needs like emailing (Gmail), blogging (Blogger) and earning (AdSense) to name a few. What about you?
[Collated from The Economist article, Inside the Googleplex]
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