Think Google is a search company? Not according to shareholders and that means to the CEO; Google is instead a web advertising company. If you have ever tried to make any money using Google Adsense you know they are making money on advertising because you certainly are not but someone is paying.
But Google wants to remain the search leader to hold its position in advertising and that means thinking about the future of search. "One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type," says Eric Schmidt in this Wall Street Journal piece. "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Isn't that a privacy issue? Not to Schmidt, who
says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find "creepy."
Yeah, sure. Abandoning all of your emails and pictures is that easy. Well, it is for me, I don't use Gmail as anything but a distributor and mine are stored locally, that goes for pictures too.
And search is permanent, he warns, so you are better off having Google filtering for you.
He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
