"Googling with Bing"

As Google has moved from noun to verb it has become synonymous with "searching" and "browsing" when used to define activities on the web. Even the search engine's fiercest competitors must weep when popular media defines their services using the big G's name to describe what they do, no matter how tongue-in-cheek the message might be. This development of Google into "Googling" stems directly from the overwhelming success of the algorithm that they use and the idealistic vision of the companies founders, Brin and Page.

Auletta's article in the New Yorker asks why Google, the megalithic everything-on-the-web monster that it is, has reason to be concerned about its place in the world or what the future holds. A point that in the last year(s) has been hammered home by the inward-folding of the Big Three auto companies, another institution that "appeared impenetrable" despite questionable business practices and a "thinly spread peanut-butter" approach to business.

With its ever-swelling series of web-applications and the acquisitions (YouTube) that prompted the company's re-labeling itself from a "search company" to a "media company" have all, at least in the eyes of many investors and analysts, contributed to a dilution of the key service that the company provides. To be fair to the naysayers, the search tool and the associated monetization tools, AdSense and AdWords, is the only truly profitable arm of the company. The quote in Auletta's article from Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's CEO, about how a company must seek out new ways of expanding once it gets to a certain size, that "…you start leaking on everyone else's industry." sums up one of the real dangers that Google faces now. Having consumed the search market and now expanding into communications, media and advertising, Google has "woken up the bears" who are now most certainly out to "beat the $#1+" out of the interloper.

I for one think that maintaining competition in markets is very important and that regulating and protecting against a total takeover is in everyone's best interest. However, if Google has discovered a better way, standing in the way of progress simply to protect vested interests with more influential lobbying partners seems abhorrent. We'll have to see how Google responds to those clamoring at its gates for now and remain vigilant for signs of monopoly and stagnation from within the leviathan that it represents.