There you are . I've said it before and I'll say it again . The internet would not have been the internet it is today without the number-churning, web-crawling, page-indexing,search-bot'ing,page-ranking stuff the Google does. !
Yes , that's right . Google has brought about the "Information Age". Every trivial bit of information I may ever need is just a single key stroke away ( quite literally , thanks to the search shortcuts that
Avant Browser offers ) . Without Google , an internet search is hopeless.
Such is the omnipresence of Google, I even dare to classify the Internet into two era's :
Before Google [ B.G] - Internet and Information was just 'there somewhere...' lying in some nook of cyberspace
After Google [A.G] - The internet came to "Life" .
I remember the days , more than 12-13 years back , when we had one 'multimedia computer' (among 100 DOS computers) at school , where we used to access the internet over a VSNL dial-up modem running at 16.6kilobits/sec, the concept of a search engine never existed . You had to know the exact URL of the portal you wanted to visit . If I remember correctly, there was only one search engine called :
Lycos ( probably more , but unheard of) . Searching information was tough.
And then , sometime in 2000, a cousin told me about this 'really awesome search engine' , which blew you away with its simplicity and effectiveness . And was he right or what ! You query it and Google spits out your results in mere milliseconds. Numerous other search engines have made many unsuccessful attempts to match google's search. None come even close . Yahoo, Live, Ask, (even lycos) fail miserably in comparison . The revered Google's page ranking algo has been imitated , but never perfected by any other algo. Google , Hat's off .
But hang on a second , is there a dark side to Google ?
Is there more to it than meets the eye ? I feel yes . With google buying out most widely used internet tools/websites/products , google has a deluge of information about every user , thanks to the single sign-on that google enforces for using a site/service. Your online presence(via search), search tags(via search) , personal info (via gmail) and multitude of associated data is mined for every-user ! Imagine all the information being stored in those countless exabytes of storage that google houses !
Reminds me of a data flow progression that one of our professors(AP) taught us in Engineering college : The DIKI.
Data --> Information --> Knowledge --> Intelligence . I hope google stops at the first "I" !
Google is already connecting a lot of dots using the
Zeitgeist (only a part of it being made public via the Zeitgeist )
Overall, barring this recent "Intelligence" that Google is deriving from dominance over Internet Search, Google still rocks ! The world would have been different without it .
[Disclaimer: I'm not being paid to write this blogpost :-) ]
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