Friday, December 12, 2008

The Google Index 4.0

The sum total of the content that sits on the Internet is a lot of data.  But computers these days are pretty good at dealing with lots of data.  The secret to Googles success is to trawl through all of this data and then to create an index for it that means that any one who wants to find something can initiate a search of this index in order to find what they want.  

Google has two ways to improve the power of their index.  One would be to make it smarter.  More information, more meta tags, more intuition of my intentions based on my search terms.  

The other is to make the index bigger.  Indexing every place in the Internet is the current scope of business.  But Google earth and Google maps are no coincidence.  The ultimate goal has to be that every single piece of data that relates to anything and anyone is in the index.  In this version of the future everything can be reduced to piece of data and be made searchable.

Apparently the line in the business is that search is now running at 5% of its known potential.  If this is the case then you would assume that the search advertising business is also only firing on 5% of is potential as well.  If the entire world was able to behave like a Google link (i.e. by pointing some kind of mobile device at an object that you want to buy or find more information about,) then the only kind of advertising would be search advertising.  Ultimately every type of marketing will have to operate a Google style business model.  

This is 'blurred line thinking.'  To think about what the world of brand communication will look like when everything is search and search is everything.  This seems pretty inevitable.  The only question will be who is running the thing.  Will it be the non Google media players who adopt a Google like mentality or will it be truly a Google earth!?

No comments: