loudspeaker - 4:43 am on Oct 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

Oh well, maybe I should drop out and join the Amish.. Change my name to Stoltzfus and spend my days guiding a horse drawn plow through the fields....

Frankly, I don't think this will be necessary because the "future" described in the article will never materialize. I think, Google is making several mistakes with their vision. Their mistakes are in:

a) Their insistence on collecting so much information. How much of it is ultimately useful? Perhaps a very small percentage. But aggregating, storing and developing algorithms to parse and data mine it will be expensive. Will we really click (or perform any other action they might yet invent) that much more when they know everything about us? I doubt it. Above all, I doubt that the ROI will be sufficiently high to justify all this.

b) Looking at any problem only as a technical challenge, essentially ignoring ALL the other dimensions - social, legal, etc. I don't think this can be changed (definitely not quickly) because it's wired in the company's DNA, but the consequence of that is that they'll stumble more and more.

c) Underestimating the backlash from the general public.

d) Underestimating the backlash from webmasters. I realize that in their vision we won't matter very much because Google will be searching everything - and probably less and less just web content. But that vision is still years away and for now, they're known as a WEB search engine. It's only as good as the sites that come up in results (i.e. the sites that allowed themselves to be spidered by that engine).

If they write us off as a vestige of the "old Internet", they'll be making the same mistake as Yahoo in the 1990's: Yahoo jumped too fast to the conclusion that search won't matter in the future. Google seems to be thinking that web sites won't matter - they want to be indexing our documents, public records, all kinds of books and even personal diaries. Let's see if it's really as useful as simply indexing THE WEB. I doubt it.

e) Overestimating their technical competence. Google is not perfect. Its results are riddled with crap and let's face it - any engine that doesn't even know who wrote a piece of content and who copied it is not very sophisticated. Better than other engines - sure, but not that good, either.

Now that their engineers are leaving for hotter startups, will Google have enough brainpower to manage their growth and their supersized ambitions?