Our Googlified world
As I typed the title for this post, I came upon a realization that I may have accidently invented a word called Googlification. Now, since I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, I decided to verify it. So I did what any normal person would do. I Googled it. And no surprise, I found quite a few sites that had already used “Googlification” and in the exact sense that I had imagined the word will be used. Google, it seems is yet too humble to accept its impact on our lives and thus our vocabulary, and it asked me if I meant “Glorification”.
The Matrix
This brilliant company has entrenched itself in our lives in such a way that soon our online lives will be serviced, monitored and controlled (whoa!) by Google and we won’t be able to detangle ourselves from this ‘web’. This will be what I refer to as “Googlification”. If you think Facebook knows a lot about you and you are worried about your privacy, just imagine how much Google knows about you. It knows your phone number and your address. It knows you searched your exes and you searched for cheap hotels and you searched for tattoo parlors and it also knows you Googled “How to handle a messy breakup”. And it knows exactly when you looked it up and what you ended up reading. Is that scary enough?
Is “do no evil” obsolete?
Google’s relentless quest for world domination started to look very real to me when looking for the next topic for this blog. I originally started writing this post about Groupon and its stalled IPO when I read the news story about Google acquiring Zagat to strengthen its Google Offers. And I read another piece about how badly Google wants Hulu and something about HTC and Google’s patent related fight with Apple. So, it could be daily deals, social networking, mobile OS (and now hardware), or cloud computing, there was no escaping Google. Google will eventually compete with every big player in most of the services of our lives. It may not succeed sometimes (Google TV, Google Wave) but it will continue to creep into everything we do online or even offline. Sure, the company pursues lofty goals like “Do no evil” but that is not that reassuring. It stood its ground in China even if it meant losing a huge market but it also helped sell illegal drugs from Canada on a very large scale.
Is there anything you can possibly do about Googlification? I have no ideas as of now. Maybe I will Google it to find out.