Google Owns You

Not only does Google have the largest search engine today it has started to amass a bunch of businesses and technologies that provide them vital user data and what you search for, what websites you go to, how long you stay there and they even record if actions are taken on those sites. If you are logged into any one of their services like Gmail or personalized search then they even know that it was you that creates certain transactions. When you signed up for Google you probably provided them with your date of birth information, gender and location info. Starting to sound a bit creepy? The truth is that Google has recently stopped public records companies from buying “proper name” search terms. I believe this was to make it seem that they were helping to protect your personal information. Why then is it a acceptable understanding that if you are looking for “dirt” or information on someone that you just “Google” them. How important is your privacy to you? Do you mind that LinkedIn, Wis.dm, Myspace and other social networking sites have opened up your personal profiles for Google and other search engines to crawl and include in their search index?

Google Buys Peakstream - PeakStream develops tools that boost the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips.

Google Buys YouTube for $1.65B - YouTube.com had approximately 19.1 million visitors in August 2006 (Comscore)

Google Acquires Feedburner for $100M - Feedburner.com is a RSS feed management company.

Google Acquires DoubleClick -
DoubleClick, the online advertising company, was purchased for $3.1 billion in cash. Read an article on why privacy advocates are concerned with the DoubleClick purchase: Google-DoubleClick deal

Google Acquisition of Urchin - Urchin developed software to help companies analyze the traffic at their Web sites.

How often are web users using Google for search? According to the latest published stats on SearchEngineWatch, Google generates about 90-100 Million searches a day and has 500,000,000 users worldwide (June, 2007).

Google has collected information from their Feedburner RSS aggregator on what sites are the most popular and what topics are most talked about. I heard that Google can basically analyze their search stream data and tell Hollywood whether a movie is going to flop or not before it even hits the theaters. Google has their own toolbar that I use everyday that collects search and click stream data, they have thousands of websites that are part of the Googe AdSense publisher network that have Google content matched ads. If you use Gmail then you’ll see sometimes that the context of your email messages get matched up with advertisers. If you are talking about an upcoming trip to Barcelona, Spain then you might see an ad that has “Cheap Hotels in Barcelona”

Free Wifi Access Data - Google is beta testing free wifi coverage areas in Mountain View right now. I am pretty sure this will allow them to get ISP-type data on users surfing behaviors.

Google Checkout - Google even wants to know what I am buying and to help me streamline my logins and passwords.

Google Even Owns Domains - A lot of people don’t actually know that Google is also a Domain Registrar and they know when you register a domain name and make any changes to it.

Google Maps Street View - They have now started photographing streets in major cities with cars that drive around and take photos in all directions. Here is a photo that one of the Google’s Toyota Prius camera cars took in SF:

So watch your back because Google surely is. How does that saying go? “Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.” It is always nice to know how big businesses are growing and who owns what and for what reasons. You all didn’t think that Google was still a garage operation? Google also is in the process of building their own power plant on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon.

Now get back to searching and blogging so they can collect some more data from you today.

-Brian

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