The Pervasiveness of Google

Here is an excerpt from an article that I found on Google that really shows just how influential it is. There are several interesting ideas proposed in the full article regarding politics among other topics. Anyhow, I would love to see what you guys think...

'Furthermore, when Google said all the world's information, it really meant all. Google News, launched in 2002, aggregates breaking stories from traditional media sources around the world. Newspapers complain that their hard-won exclusives are being hijacked to boost Google's profits...Google Maps and Google Earth, launched in 2005, offer an astonishing interactive map of the planet, stitched together from aerial and satellite footage licenced from Nasa and various private companies. 

Google Street View, released in America last year, takes this a step further by providing photographs taken at eye level, which has prompted media alarm about invasion of privacy...

Google's acquisition in 2006 of YouTube... caught most attention as a disrupter of the old media landscape. Its willingness to let people post and watch video clips for free has panicked the TV and film industries and provoked a $1bn lawsuit from the US entertainment group Viacom for 'massive copyright infringement'.

Google's tentacles are everywhere. It runs services for blogging, email, instant messaging, shopping and social networking. It offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and other tools to rival Microsoft's products in the workplace. It is building a software platform for mobile phones that may challenge Apple's iPhone and others. It has just launched Knol, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia to take on Wikipedia. In America, Google Health enables users to maintain their own medical records. The company is also working on language translation, speech recognition and video search...

The problem with Google now is that they have to keep growing,' says Andrew Keen. 'If they wanted to, they could destroy the publishing business and kill newspapers. Everything they do has a profound impact. It's like that saying about America: when Google sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold."

I was very shocked at the pervasiveness of Google and how expansive their impact really is. Many of us rely on Wikipedia for information, our doctor's office to store our medical information, and microsoft word to create documents, among other things. It appears that every facet of our online and mobile lives has already become reliant on Google, but soon our personal lives will be too. Doctor's records, newspapers, television watching, all online instead of in print or at the office. I'm not sure how I feel about this exactly, but here are some questions to think about/respond to.

1. For how long will these companies and services be of use to us if Google creates their own version?

2. Is it possible that the integration of all of the important elements of our daily lives under one umbrella is actually beneficial for the consumer even though it would mean that Google has effectively monopolized the tools and luxuries of our daily lives? How problematic is this really? 

3. Is it the case that any service/application that Google gains becomes the dominant and most widely used application of that type? Why?

4. What are your thought on the quote "If Google sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold?" How would you interpret this and do you agree?

Here is the link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/17/googlethemedia.google