The Church of Google

“Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they’re no more than the delusions of grandeur” (176). Although Google is the best search engine on the Internet (it’s the most popular website for a reason--whatever information you want to find is available to you for free in less than two seconds), the men who invented it, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, don’t seem to be satisfied with it yet. They want to keep improving it “until it is able to index the Web every second to allow real-time search.’ The company is also striving to further expand its hold on Web users and their data” (159). Now, this may be more of Nicholas Carr’s paranoia that the Internet is taking over the world, but Google is quickly becoming a kind of “God” of the Internet. Over the last couple of years, it has been buying up a number of different companies, including YouTube and Android. But including the comment about Google wanting to “expand its hold on Web users and their data”, I think Carr is suggesting that the website is getting too big and powerful for its own good—as if targeting consumers with relevant advertisements was the worst thing imaginable. Like every business, Google wants to make money. And while that is acceptable to Carr, it seems to me that he’s terrified of what lengths Google will go to in order to make that money: “The steady colonization of additional types of content also furthers the company’s mission of making the world’s information ‘universally accessible and useful.’ Its ideals and its business interests converge in one overarching goal: to digitize ever more types of information, move the information onto the Web, feed it into its database, run it through its classification and ranking algorithms, and dispense it in what it calls ‘snippets’ to Web surfers, preferably with ads in tow” (161).

Nicole Dowling