Google: The Meta Brain

Better late than never, I have finally decided to post my thoughts on Google. Actually I have decided to open this blog because I've had a growing need to share my thoughts on this subject. There is no doubt this company will have a big impact on our lives.

Inspiration

What inspired me to act was Ray Kurzweil's keynote presentation at the recent Gilder-Forbes 2005 Telecosm conference. Ray's keynote was an introduction to his fantastic new book, The Singularity Is Near. There are two main lines of thinking in the book. One is the overall progress we experience is exponential. Second is all the atoms in the universe will soon have their representation in the information domain as bits. Everything is and will be pictured, designed, described, cataloged, measured. While that is indeed true, this is enormous amount of information. So where will it reside? On the Internet of course. And how will we manage this information? Or, to be precise, who will manage this information for us? Well... there is one company you all already know. It's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Are you aware of any other, better positioned to do this job?
If you watch carefully, you will see every product Google releases is oriented to gather more and more information from you. So for those of you who are not familiar with them, let us have a quick look at what they have.

Services

1. Search. This is obvious. You search. They store all the keywords you put in. And they build the search patterns. So you may actually see the search patterns. What are people interested in. By date, by geography, by time of day. What is more. If you look for several things one after another, they actually build a pattern of sets. BTW - have you played with http://labs.google.com/sets? One thing to note here - Google search is not just an index - they keep the Internet in their cache. So once search pattern algorithms improve, they can rerun them on the information stored on their system.
2. News. They scan and store everything that is published in the news. And for sure they know the patterns of interest in certain news. Again this may be sliced and diced by many dimensions, as date, time, geography and so on...
3. Gmail. They give you 2,5GB (and growing) of storage to use. And based on the patterns they see in your emails and attachments, they build a pattern representing yourself. Don't be afraid. They do not need your personal data like address or a phone number. This is just statistics. And patterns. But these statistics are valuable for them. The value you provide with your input is at least equal to an excellent email application plus server space of 2,5GB.
   And one thing to note - Gmail used to be an invitation-only service. So to open an Gmail account you would have to be invited by someone who already has Gmail. This is an obvious way to collect information on patterns of relationships between people.
4. Personalized portal. I'm not sure how many of you use the portal. http://www.google.com/ig. You have to open an account with Google to use this. Account is free. And set the above page as your home page. And customize it. You may place many so-called web-parts on the page, each containing the items of interest for you. There are many predefined by Google, but as the entire thing is driven by RSS, you can add your own information feeds. As you navigate through many sites, you may notice an orange RSS or XML or ATOM icon. This indicates the site publishes its information in the RSS format. And this can be copied/pasted into Google portal page, so in the end it will contain everything you need. Your own links included. Try to add my blog there: http://headworx.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
5. Orkut. Not sure if any of you have come across this. Orkut (as Gmail before) is not available to everyone. Yet. This is an elite, invitation - only service. The purpose of Orkut is to support virtual communities. So you have a place when a community can gather and share their information with each members. See? Another pattern. By means of Orkut they build a map of who you connect with and what you share.
6. blogspot.com. I will not repeat myself. This is another information - gathering engine that feeds the pattern - building and indexing / storage engine.
7. Gtalk. The same. All your chats feed the beast.
8. video.google.com. This is an important piece of the puzzle. Google indexes video feeds of TV programming (using speech to text engines) and allows you to upload your own video clips. In my opinion this is the closest thing to the "Live-After-television" we have to date. You can then search for your specific video material and play it on demand. Just what Chris Anderson touted during his Telecosm 2005 keynote. See? The ability to upload the private clips is just making the long tail of the Internet!
9. Google answers. Another interesting service. You may post a question and set a price you may be willing to pay if some professional will answer your question. For this service they hired an army of contractors. So you ask, they answer, you pay. And every question and answer is later available for others to search for. So in the end... they will have answers ready for an every question ever asked!
10. Google Network. Then there comes this Google Network rumor. Google is building their own network. WOW! While there are many speculations as to why they would do this, the answer is easy. They need this network, together with the WiFi service they will offer (http://wifi.google.com/faq.html) to funnel all the traffic from people connecting to their (free) WiFi spots via their servers, and again extract the information patterns. These patterns themselves are probably worth enough to build the infrastructure and provide the WiFi service for free. Won't you use these hotspots? You will... The price you pay by means of providing your input to the Google pattern processing engine is not high...

I could go on and on... Generally it is a good practice to visit http://labs.google.com/ from time to time and try the new services they come up with. But you probably already can see Google is a beast feeding with information from any possible source. And you bet they have the technology and brains to transform, index and organize this information. There is not much disclosed information on how their system is organized inside. By all means Google is the most advanced distributed storage and processing system on the planet. May be on October 18 we will learn more? There is a scheduled presentation by Jeff Dean on the BigTable.

BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data. The system is designed to manage several petabytes of data distributed across thousands of machines, with very high update and read request rates coming from thousands of simultaneous clients. In this talk, Jeff will discuss the basic design of BigTable and its implementation, provide some performance measurements, and outline some current applications of the system. He'll also touch on Google's future goals and directions for the system.

Will be definitely interesting to watch...

Patterns

As I keep reading through Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" I see Google fulfils his vision of the ultimate pattern - based, information processing engine. So again to make things clear. I do not worry they collect any personal information about us. What they do is they build patterns. Patterns representing every user and every information context they look for. Having the patterns (even anonymous) is the ultimate power, once you know how to process them.

Loosening my fantasy a little bit I can extrapolate what they do, to what Kurzweil describes as the new form of machine intelligence. It is not a far shot to say Google may represent the new form of intelligence. The next step in evolution. The meta-brain. In this scenario Google patterns engine and its network may represent a brain-like connections between neurons. And the neurons are us. Yes, we are the basic building blocks for this new meta-brain that will rule the world. Isn't it true? Yes, it is. Think of it that way: how many times you turn to Google to solve the problem or ask a question you are trying to answer? It already is The Brain you turn to.

Business

Now let’s look at the business models. Everything they do is financed by the advertisers. People trying to sell something to you. Classical advertising is not targeted. This means the ad may hit (and it does) many people not interested in it. So typically the yield from placing the ad is very small (a fraction of a percent). But when you target the ad, the yield goes up dramatically. And that is the business power of the information pattern processing engine. The way Google AdSense works. It matches the pattern of the ad (or it’s target audience) with a profile of people browsing the web. And every time the AdSense link is presented to you, it is likely to be relevant to the areas of your interest. Obviously this is not perfect yet. But as they gather more and more patterns from the Web, the accuracy of the AdSense improves. Ultimately you may envision all information (remember, all atoms have their bit representation) is stored on their servers and they have the complete knowledge of what the ad is (its target market) and will serve you only the ads you are interested in. This is enormous power for the advertisers. Having the engine that precisely pinpoints the target market for products you want to sell is a breakthrough. Obviously the traditional ads is just a part of the picture. The future uses are limitless. With IPTV you can imagine a scenario when you sit in front of your TV and say “play me something, I will like”. Then the pattern matching engine goes off and based on the pattern describing yourself matched against patterns of all video programs ever created, will present you a page - long menu of choices, or if you are feeling lucky, the show will start.

What is next?

There are thousands of questions on what Google has up in their sleeves. Again, the answers are really simple. Think of any means of creating new information patterns. Google will try to capture them. Creating many simple to use services, sponsored by advertisers, they will attract more and more people to their sites. So what is in the pipeline? Let us guess... Here are two of my predictions:

1. Google Calendar. There is an address http://calendar.google.com working already. Nothing there yet, but at least the page does not return an 404 error, so it is being prepared...
2. Google Office. The recently announced collaboration with Sun Microsystems brings one thing in mind: Star Office software suite. The Office suite fills the gap. Of course only when it will save the documents on Google's servers. This way the documents will contribute their part to the pattern processing engine.

The company inside

What makes them so powerful? Or... who makes them so powerful? The important thing is to look at the people. Until we have intelligent systems that will design and create even more intelligent systems, we have to rely on people. And to create the best, we need the best people. Google has been very successful in attracting the best talent on the planet to work for them. There are creators and mind breakers rushing from every side to join Google. From Microsoft, from IBM, from top universities. Why? Because they love to create. And Google lets them do it. They have to work fo the company only 80% of their time. And spare 20% time on what they think is most important. Creativity and new ideas are unleashed.

Google seeks to hire only the best. We conduct business following the spirit and the intent of the equal opportunity laws and we strive towards maintaining a diverse community. We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job.

GOOG

Nobody will guarantee you their achievements will translate into expected stock appreciation. Near term they may be vulnerable to some desperate moves from companies like Microsoft. For example if MSFT buys AOL, GOOG may loose some revenue short/mid term. But in my opinion what is important is the long term view, and that, by all means is very optimistic.

See you next time.
Headworx.