Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 4
What Google truly is
Picture if you will yourself standing in a blank field with no grass just a white, shiny linoleum floor below your feet. Now picture yourself looking up into the sky and seeing floating there above you, everything, and I mean everything…cats, books, people, bottled water, stinky cheese….everything you can possibly imagine. Don’t worry, it won’t fall on you, it is out of your reach and you aren’t quite sure how to get to it. Now picture a funnel like the ones people use to put oil in their cars but really, really big floating there right above you. You smile when you see the brand name Google in multicolored letters on its side. It’s floating in between you and everything you can imagine. That is the place where Google wants to be, in between you and everything else in the world. Why? So as they index everything in the world and effectively provided it to you through searches……they can also provide advertising that matches up well to what you’re looking for so it doesn’t bother you and you find value in it. Since it doesn’t bother you there is a much higher likelihood that you’ll click on the ads to purchase the a desired product or service, making Google money.
Okay that explains where Google wants to be and how we help them make money to sustain their efforts of indexing and categorizing all of the world’s information but it doesn’t clearly explain why they give away all that really good free stuff. Think back to that situation where you’re in the blank field everything in the world is up in the air above you and Google is a funnel allowing you to reach all those things. In my mind the funnels big but doesn’t cover everything. We have to aim the funnel correctly to find some of the things we would be looking for (this would be akin to changing the words you search with to find exactly what you are looking for). Google understands that it is not a big enough funnel to encompass everything and that it is up to the user of the Google to tailor their search (aim the funnel) to find exactly what they want.
But what if that funnel was constantly growing in size? Would the person searching with it not have to be quite as accurate with their “aiming” of the funnel? I think so, and I think Google thinks so as well. So now let’s picture the funnel growing in size, representing Google becoming more aware of the information and content that is on the web. Google still has to go out and learn or find new things on the web constantly in order to become more aware of newly created data. It is arguable that Google is simply the best thing known to man at finding new information on the web but it still has its work cut out for it.
Now imagine if the information and content that is created and placed on the Web is done through one of Google’s many, MANY, outstanding applications (that happen to be free). People would not just be creating content on the web with really good free tools but at the same time making Google aware of that content and thereby helping Google to index and catalog that new content allowing it to grow at an astounding rate. So to answer the question “Why does Google give away incredibly good software and tools?” I would have to say it is so Google can increase its awareness of existing and newly created information on the web at an exponential rate.
The Good: We not only get better results from our searches on the web but we get really good free tools to create and place new information on the web. In a lot of cases we would have spent money in the past for the types of tools Google is providing to us at little or no cost. The information that is put up on the web using these tools is structured to be easily indexed and categorized by Google because it was placed there via Google.
The Bad: To start with, if I owned a software company that made its billions by providing software packages to my customers for hundreds and thousands of dollars per user /per company and suddenly someone (Google) was giving away for free the same tools I charged money for, I would have to imagine my business would change or maybe even go away. This would no doubt have some substantial impact on the economy good or bad. Secondly, if you follow this process out for 10 or 20 years, you would start to see Google having what some might call an unhealthy level of awareness/interaction with the world’s information. The saying “With great power, comes great responsibility” comes to mind. And while Google has a policy of “don’t be evil” it is in fact run by humans and as of yet no social structure is immune to corruption. Last but not least, at what point do we start thinking of Google like we thought of a “Ma Bell” or a “Standard Oil”? And when we do, how would we break up a company that spans the globe in such a ubiquitous manner and still allow it to do the thing it does best that we so heavily rely on?
To be continued…
