Google: Do No Evil

In what seems like one of the worst antitrust suit cases of all time the Department of Justice is going after Google for their search engine. Like nearly all antitrust suits competitors begin to gripe about how “unfair” the market is and try to get the government involved to break up any type of “monopoly”. People are concerned about Google’s dominance. Nextag and Yelp claim that Google was ranking Google products higher than leading competitor’s products. What is really fascinating is that unlike previous monopoly companies (Microsoft, Standard Oil, and IBM) Google doesn’t even really charge to use its service. I find it hard to call Google a monopoly when consumers are not even paying for it! Not only is Google search free, but other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and other services are free to use. This is interesting because people years ago would have paid a premium for the quality of data on Google. Researchers even in the early 1990’s had to physically go into libraries hunt down books in order to do research. Google has made searching for hard to find facts and data fast, easy, and very inexpensive. Google handles 34,000 searches per second or over 1 trillion searches per year. I have a feeling Google uses these searches to improve searching. One feature I have noticed Google uses is auto-complete where you type something in and Google tries to figure out what you are typing. Also if you misspell something Google will say “Did you mean…” Google was only founded in 1997 so it hasn’t had a long history yet I have a feeling the technology will get better.

With so much data online now the value will be data mining. Data mining is using data to solve problems or recognize patterns that can help researchers find a common thing between data. Google ranks websites or pages based on how relevant they are. In 2009, alone 47 million websites were added. Google has software that can crawl though these websites and pick up information that people might search. Sites that are visited more frequently are ranked higher than sites not used as much. Even when I have researched certain things I find Google doesn’t always give me the best answer. No doubt in the coming years even more information will be put online which will allow Google searches to get even better.

Why the Department of Justice is wasting countless hours bringing top executives from Google to testify is mindboggling. Executives at any Fortune 500 could be doing better things with their time rather than explaining why their search engine is better than everyone else’s. Like history shows consumers never complain about monopolies it is the competitors who complain because they are getting their clocks cleaned.

Driverless Cars: Part Deux

Recently the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt autonomous cars. Wait if we have driverless cars do we really need the DMV? One can only dream. Even as free market as I am, I still think you need rules in the early stages of driverless cars. Google has test driven some of these cars already and before long these cars will only get more experience. One thing people forget is that the longer technology has been out there it will only get better through innovation and by trial and error. The first cars will of course not be perfect. I don’t doubt people might get hurt or could possibly die in the first edition of these kinds of cars. The question will be however will driverless cars be safer than an ordinary human driver? I think the answer is: In time yes driverless cars will be safer than human drivers. Humans are incredibly smart creatures and even robots can’t capture all of our intelligence. However, robots are very good at repeated tasks and doing things much more precisely than humans.

My theory is that driverless cars will not happen over-night, but however be a gradual process. The first stage might be to have the driverless cars with some human assistance. Gradually though the amount of human intervention needed would decrease as cars become smarter and safer. These driverless cars could serve as taxi-cabs if they were truly driverless. Another application might be to have the cars do errands for people. One example could be the car could drive itself to the grocery store and pick up items. The car could park in some type of lane and a clerk from the store could load the food into the car. This sounds like a neat idea but even I know its decades away.

The legislation in Nevada about driverless cars is a step in the right direction. In a earlier blog I went into more detail about the possible benefits from driverless cars and still feel as if they would benefit society immensely.