If you blinked at any point in the past year, you may have missed one of the many new offerings by everyone's favorite public corporation, Google. It wasn't too long ago that Google was the darling of the geeks, with their clean interface and powerful search engine that rid us of the visual nightmare that was Yahoo. But then they went public, and Slashdot turned against them.

At first I was skeptical, figuring that it was just more of the same crowd that loves skewering Microsoft for releasing popular products finding fault with anyone who makes a buck. The furor even died down somewhat, but have you noticed how much they've done recently?

Google Talk indexing your conversations, the Google sidebar indexing your desktop, Picasa indexing your pictures, Gmail indexing your email, Google Maps indexing where you go and where you live, Google Analytics indexing your personal web site traffic (as well as this site's traffic...), Google Base indexing your recipes and items for sale, and someday the Google book offering indexing what you read.

Clearly from here there are only two possibilities. One is that Google organizes the mishmash of pornography and people buying video game content for thousands of dollars that is the internet into a digital version of the Great Library of Alexandria, making it a real repository of the collective knowledge of the human race.

The other is that it uses all of this information to finally give us Minority Report-style advertising wherever we go, targeted specifically to us. One of these two possibilities makes money, the other doesn't.

Google can waste their time mining my data and analyzing my click patterns, but they'll just learn what is blatantly obvious: I spend most of my time online looking for code samples to help me with programming projects at work. See, Google, all you had to do was ask.

Posted by: Charlie at November 17, 2005 9:31 PM

Posted by: Chris Hill Festival at November 19, 2005 8:45 AM

Posted by: Brian at November 21, 2005 10:08 AM