With the most recent news of Google mass-scanning millions of books in libraries across the world, a company who's business is search engines and money maker is advertising, gone too far?
Geeks were talking a while back about the Google OS, although this was just geek speculation nothing really came out of it. We use a tiny Google search engine for our desktops, Froogle to find christmas presents, GoogleAds to pay for those goddamn bandwidth bills, our corporations use the Google appliance to search their intranets and most of all we use Google because every other dick does.
Including Amazon.com.
So, has the day come when the internet is slowly being run by one organisation? Has the monopoly gotten too big, or is it just a joke?
Discuss.
You forgot to mention Gmail.
Oh, come on. Before Google, it was Yahoo!, and before them, AltaVista, and before them, WebCrawler. Maybe a little HotBot in between somewhere. Like all other companies (perhaps even more so), tech companies come and go.
And what "monopoly" does Google have, when 90% of the unwashed masses fire up their Windows PC, double-click Internet Explorer and are automatically taken to MSN.com?
Have you seen the look of http://search.msn.com/ ?
People switched to google because it did everything better than the competition. The odd thing is these old competitors still haven't changed their tactics. Take a look at yahoo - the mainpage is still just as cluttered as it was four years ago. Altavista seems to have clued in somewhat.
I do have some concerns about potential for abuse though. If they wanted to google could gather an overwhelming amount of data on one person. GoogleAds can track you on unrelated webpages, google searches can be kept track of. And then the kicker, which can turn you from anonymous to a name - gmail. Dataminers would be having orgasms over google logging.
Are they abusing it? Probably not. But the potential is there. I'm less concerned about monopoly for now since there are some other major players. Like Albright pointed out, Microsoft lurks in the fringes. Google may have a difficult time against other niche players like LexisNexis as well.
LexisNexis is a whole different kind of ballgame. They've got agreements with newswires, journals, typical pay-access repositories... they were electronically adding and indexing periodical content before RSS was a twinkle in Netscape's eye.
It's the gated community of search engines.
But sometimes information is in there that is no where else; or if it's available publically, it's not available forever (see any online newspaper or magazine)
>Like Albright pointed out, Microsoft lurks in the fringes.
Erm, that's not quite what I was pointing out. My point was that Microsoft is [i]not[/i] lurking in the fringes; my point was that, if [i]anyone[/i] has a monopoly on the internet, it's Microsoft. I forgot to include that that 90% likely has a hotmail.com email address as well...
I don't know about that. There's no doubt Microsoft holds a lot of sway, but I have never actually seen anyone use MSN search. I go to my local law library (hardly the brightest technical bulbs), and they're all using google (or LexisNexis, Brookers, Butterworths, etc).
They are, or their tech support guys are? Remember, I'm talking about the unwashed masses here, who know little about their computers beyond the "Getting Started" manual.
(Speaking of which, I used bbcode in >>7. I'm so embarassed... :/ )
The lawyers were the ones using google (the few tech support people I saw didn't seem to know their asses from a hole in the ground).
But I'd have been surprised if they weren't using it. Maybe going to libraries and spending time around universities places me in a biased demographic, but I can honestly say I've never seen anyone use MSN search. I've seen plenty using hotmail though.