Letting that pet go loose

ECENT observation of Google’s moves has led to the accumulation of several remarks. Hereby, I would like to list a few of them, getting them off my chest for what it’s worth.

• Google Base. For those who do not know, Google have just launched a new services that awakens the desire to stand up and shout “All your bases are belong (sic) to Google”, which is a phrase that goes far back in time. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it stems from poor translation of a computer game and its rapid spread is primarily attributed to UseNet. Google Base, as the service was entitled, appears to be eyeing that gigantic, non-profitable Craig’s List, intending to use that new platform for embedment of yet more targetted ads. This argument is nothing beyond speculation nonetheless.
• Literature domination. The highly controversial book scanning initiative (Google Print), supposedly to be followed by Microsoft rather soon. Where there is potential evil, there must be a Microsoft stampede.
• Updates with personality. Google are naming their updates, e.g. Bourbon and now Jagger (due to complete at the beginning of next month). That naming convention is reminiscent of that which is ascribed to hurricanes. Do they have a list of names queued up for future assignment?
• Indexing Obsession. Google have declared their desire to crawl and organise the entire human knowledge. They also said that indexing may take 300 years (a wild speculation by their CEO), but should they not understand content rather than simply index it all? I have recently proposed an alternative, which relies on semantics and factual data.

Now that my rants have been voiced, I feel surprisingly relieved. I like Google and often rave about their search performance. All in all, I hope my criticisms are all constructive rather than unnecessarily excruciating.

CORRECTION (29/10/2005): the current update was dubbed “Jagger” by WebmasterWorld.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 7:24 am and is filed under Humour, Internet, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.