Google everywhere
Is it my imagination or are Google
steadily taking over the world? The famous
advertising-company-with-a-search-engine are into a vast array of
things - from operating
systems to mobile
phones to web
traffic analysis. They own YouTube,
webvertising company DoubleClick
and map planet Earth,
the moon, Mars and even the stars. They're
in the process of granting themselves the rights to everything
ever published - and cutting themselves in for a cosy 37%
of all e-books published in the future. What's next, you may be
wondering?How about the internet itself - or at least a key piece of its infrastructure? Last week Google announced the setting up of their very own Domain Name Server.
So what's left? How about real estate?
Yup, they're moving in there too. On the same day as the DNS announcement they mentioned they'd soon start mapping properties for sale in the UK, causing shares in a property portal called Rightmove to fall "more than 10% ... the sharpest faller in the FTSE 350 index of companies for the day". Apparently they already map properties in Australia - the only downside of that being that then you'd have to live there ...
Now I'm certainly no fan of parasitic real estate agents, but this Googlisation of virtually everything leaves me a little uneasy. Are we letting one corporation have too much power?
It reminds me of a favourite quote mine;
"Power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great
men are almost always bad men."
- John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
(1834-1902)
I know his birth and death dates because I looked him up on ... oh damn ...
PC World is New Zealand’s top selling computing and technology magazine.
Comments
And now they've "invented" real time chat messaging ( google-wave) where you can see what people are typing to you....hmmm
In the mid 1990's ICQ had that..
On the upside Google Chrome Beta for Linux has just surfaced (using it to type this) and its FAST..
REAL FAST.
Makes my Firefox feel very ordinary.
So far the Big G has not offended me enough to go elsewhere :)
Posted by: chris | December 13, 2009 11:47 AM
At propertyportalwatch.com, we have been closely watching the progress of Google in Australia since it launched here 6 months ago.
The bottom lineis that there has been little impact beyond the obligatory hype.
The market leader, realestate.com.au has become stronger, its share price has increased over 50%, and it now have 20% more visitors to its site (5.6m in October).
More importantly, when chatting with agents, most are unaware of its existance and if they are aware, they are not generating enough leads for Google to be relevant.
There is a large gap between putting up a site and truly challenging the market leaders.
For more views on this, check out www.propertyportalwatch.com
Posted by: Simon Baker | December 8, 2009 9:54 AM