Google Rules the World

I ran across an article earlier today titled Google’s Six-Front War, written by guest contributor Semil Shah of TechCrunch. The article focuses on 6 main components of the Google company, and the war within to "rule" the technology and information front.

For quite some time I have been a solid fan of Google...from Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar to search options, and my Droid phone, Google has been a steady part of my everyday life in terms of communication, productivity, and basic research. On the flip side of this coin, I am also an avid apple consumer. For roughly 14 years now, I have owned and worked solely on a Mac, except for when at work, and I can honestly say, I will never ever personally own a PC computer. Mac's work for me and from experience, they are stable machines (I had one for 10 straight years and it continued to work even through to the point of upgrading). I'm getting a bit sidetracked, but I say all of this because many people have asked me why I didn't purchase an iPhone. The reality is that my life heavily revolves around Google, and for syncing purposes, the Droid was an obvious choice.

Enough about my personal preferences though... here are a few highlights from the article that I find particularly interesting:

Facebook
Throughout much of the article, Facebook is brought into play as a competitor of Google. There is talk of Facebook potentially creating or being interested in a social browser and a mobile device. I know Facebook is huge, but can it *really* compete with Google in terms of a mobile device? Maybe so... and we're living in interesting times to see this war of the top dogs play out.

The Google Search
This is how Google made a name for itself, but this article proposes that even the search aspect of Google is being challenged. I haven't taken it that far in my head yet, but to some degree, maybe Mr. Shah is right. People are gathering information in very different ways these days. They are gaining their information/news/weather/events from social media avenues, and there is a possibility that the Google Search that once was is waning. Mr. Shah puts it this way: "On desktops and laptops, people will continue to use a variety of browsers, though they end up spending a lot of time on Facebook, which scares Google because of the trend of people moving slowly from search to discovery." I love that phrase - search to discovery. The phrase is at the heart of what is being taught in my information literacy course. Students need to know how to properly search for credible information, but there is definitely a discovery component that comes into play during our evaluation week. With information coming at us at exponential speeds and volumes, what we are discovering must be evaluated for credibility and authority.

So, for now, I still believe Google is the forerunner (at least for me) in terms of digital information and information seeking behaviors...but will it continue to rule the world? Interesting stuff!