A word synonymous these days with search, and even the web as a whole.
Students the world over depend on it for innumerable assignments. Researchers access scholarly papers at speeds hitherto unbelievable. Mothers can search for so many recipes their kitchens creak in dismay, and fathers can sneak peeks at video assembly walkthroughs for that new Ikea table so quickly you might not catch them.
And it's all free.
How the heck does Google do that?
Well, ads, for one. Those semi-unobtrusive ads in the sidebars of Gmail and Google searches. Youtube commercials that sometimes can, sometimes can't be skipped. Ads power the internet as much as the electricity powering our computers and their servers.
Sure, there likely are other sources of income, but I'm not focusing on that for now.
Rather, how the heck does Google stay on top?
How do they return the best search results, fastest, constantly improving and always showering us with nifty new (free!) things?
It's that last part, actually, that I feel is a great part of Google's secret.
Check out A Google A Day: http://www.agoogleaday.com
It's a riddle, posed by Google, that ought take some Googling to unravel. Mysteries that perhaps Ken Jennings (or Watson, the IBM supercomputer!) would know offhand, but the rest of us likely must search for.
And what do we do? Use the convenient and ever-present Google search right there to find the answer!
Now, who would Google make such a thing? Why do they care about the mild entertainment that these riddles bring us? Are they really just interested in bringing a little smile to our faces?
No. Well, maybe, but not in the broader sense.
Google is learning from us. Always. Our search terms, our intended destinations, what we click on and see and check and so on are all monitored. Not in a Big Brother way, and I'll mention why that's not as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be soon. No, Google is giving us the destination. An unusual one, with multiple searches likely needed. They are testing tools, like Google Deja, which allows one to search the internet as it was a day ago, before people like me start posting answers to A Google A Day answers (though I won't post today's answer nor what I searched to get it.)
When you give thousands of people a specific query, something that is hard to put into words, something tricky, we all jam our fingers on our keyboards, find or don't find the answers, and go on with our lives.
But Google watches, and learns. The searches we use, the terms and specific utterances, the nuances of speech we use when searching for something that Google basically asked us to find on our own, is helping them. Their free tools that we enjoy and play with and use and even rely on all contribute to a more powerful, useful, Google.
Let's take a look at another example. The free (of course) and wonderful (also of course) Google Voice.
I'll leave it up to you to explore it if you've not heard of it, but I'll say it's great. Let me instead focus on one small part, here. In their voicemail features, Google Voice transcribes your voicemails for you. How cool! You can get them via text or email.
These transcriptions are solid black text if it's sure of the word(s), and grayer as the believed accuracy goes down. This is a fairly one-way street. Yet, in these transcriptions, there is a little box on the right that asks if the transcription was useful or not. If you say yes or no, it asks if you can "donate" the voicemail to Google.
This is the key.
There is, I feel, nothing wrong with letting some Google engineer listen to my voicemails. Likely, they aren't going to anyways. It's probably just going to go through automated processes. And as I said before, I'll get into why I don't care if they are listening in on me (when I say then can, which really is pretty much always.) The kicker is this: Google is getting free, real-world data from me and thousands like me from their free service. Very very valuable data.
Their tools transcribe audio for me, I decide if it was good or not, let them know, they can piece it apart and together and all which ways to make their service better.
And I'll continue to use it, for free, and notice it get better! Hooray for me!
No. Hooray for Google. Through their clever giving away of many services and features and asking for tiny bits of data here and there in return, they gain over time absolute GOBS of very very useful data. Data that helps them make the best tools, make those already best tools better, and continue to dominate the search market.
That is why they're on top, and doing it giving away so much for free. Because we pay nothing and they reap rewards from it anyways.
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