Googlewhack!

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

“Google is God,” many are apt to
declare. And they are, really, close to
being right… in certain senses. For
example, you get a .odt file from someone
when you expected a Word document. You
scratch your head for a while—“open document
something?”—and then you give up and do the
usual thing: www.google.com. Type in just “.odt”
without the quotes, and you’re in business: a
link to a forum, a link to a page, and seconds
later, via a link you find, you have a Word doc-
ument. Try it!
Now go to, for example, Yahoo! Search. Otago
Daily Times. Not so helpful…? Next up: some
world maps. Not so helpful…?
That example graphically demonstrates why
Google is the most popular search engine. No-
one can say it is “the best,” because that’s a
much tougher question.
Now, back to the clicks: all this fabulous
search technology, all the power that Google
has come to be known for, all its great products,
rest on one edifice—its advertising pro-
grammes, AdWords and AdSense. (We’re
focusing here on AdSense.) It seems money is
just a click away—to be precise, a few thousand
clicks. Those clicks can be engineered.