I had a bit of a “Dur!” moment last night. You know, one of those points at which something that should have been so blindingly obvious suddenly snaps into place?
I had a long-standing engagement with the Richmond, Kew and Chiswick Friends of Beer Society, and was catching up with a couple of mates from school days. Towards the end of the evening, Rich mentioned that he'd found a really good way to find out about the current state of the nation.
Rich is one of the founders of a reasonably successful internet venture, and in recent times they've branched into personal finance, having built the business around brokering insurance, travel services and wotnot. The revelation that he had had had come from the remarkable rate that cash is currently burned if you buy Google adwords that are based around personal loans.
Simply put, an awful lot of people at the moment are spending an awful lot of time trying to find ways to (presumably re-finance) their spending excesses of recent years.
So what was the “Dur?” moment? Well, what I suddenly realised was that the unassailable power to do bad things that Google currently has, for me, rests in their unique ability to track, analyse, and potentially commercially exploit the zeitgeist. Within reason, anyone could build a search engine index to be able to rival or even better what Google have done in the past decade. What nobody can do is to generate the same level of metadata about who is searching for what, and in that real-time information lies Google's position of power.
It seems that Google's common line of defence as they come under increasing monopoly watchdog scrutiny is that 'it's all alright- just trust us'. Trust us that we aren't jigging the system when it comes to positioning of search results. Trust us that we aren't manipulating the adwords system in a way that gives us unfair competitive advantage. And, trust us that we aren't using our privileged access to the data that surrounds the Google search engine to give us monopolistic advantage.
Data about what people are searching for could, I'm sure, answer the vast majority of questions that any marketeer could ever wish to ask. Will anyone outside of the Googleplex get the chance to ask?
mmitII 