Simplicy is the most complex achievement
Jason Grant, Flexewebs
Yesterday I watched a hugely interesting video about the on-going work at Google with many highly interesting facts about how the company works from behind the scenes.
Google: behind the screen
Videos from inside Google are always interesting, but often quite generic and talk more or less about the same topics which are covered in the textual format on Google's pages.
The video about Google which I watched yesterday poses some very interesting questions (and probably not enough of them) about Google's on-going efforts to digitise world's paper based information and create even bigger database of various information from all sorts of sources.
One of the most interesting facts about the company to me was the fact that vice president Marrisa Mayer didn't seem to have any views about some of the more concrete questions about what Google is trying to do with information and its 'big brother' like potentials, considering Google knows so much about so many people in the world.
Furthermore, Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Evangelist, kept pointing out that Google is a private corporation, hence we should not expect it to behave in any majorly different manner.
Another important aspect is that everyone pretty much kept outlining that Google is a media company and as such has the options of doing with information what it wants to do with it.
Personally, I found most fascinating Google's rush to digitise world's books and make them searchable through their search and books programme.
The reason why this is fascinating is because we are moving towards the age of paperless world (Hooray! say the Amazonian people) which means that all of our information will reside in the virtual world (Hooray! say the people from SecondLife) and those companies who control where the information is stored and how it is accessed will have the most power.
Of course, Google's results are based on the popularity of the discussion amongst Web users around the world and the amount linking to a web site that takes place (each link counts as a vote to a web site being linked to), so the most popular results are not necessarily the most credible ones, but the most popular ones (Google refers to them as most relevant results).
Beyond fascination to me is the work Google is carrying out on 'training' their translation algorithms to interpret from language to language.
In future it will be possible to search for information in English and if there are no relevant English pages about that search term, Google will be able to fetch the information from a Chinese or Arabic web site and interpret it back into English.
Thinking about this in a little larger context, it will most probably be possible to use Google as a real time translation tool into which we are going to be able to talk in English and it will be able to interpret the information into Cantonese language in real time.
Marrisa also speaks about the personal search results which will be made possible in future and which will work on such basis that results which we click on often will be made available closer to the top of the SERPs.
I personally see this idea as bad, since it will then theoretically be impossible for businesses to know how low or high they are ranking in the 'wild' without people slanting the search results with their own prejudices.
Who knows, maybe it will be implemented in a way that actually adds more value to the web, but at the moment I am not seeing how it will, as the results with this approach will (in my view) be made much more ... irrelevant?!
It would be interesting to hear people's opinions on this subject matter, which I believe is one of the most important of our time altogether, or at least for the IT sector.
6:15 PM 
