The Googleverse

So in an email conversation with Wendell the topic of Google's Adsense program comes up, which seems to me like a good "pay-for-click" affiliate program, but it gets me to thinking about how overwhelming and ubiquitous the Google machine has become. I remember a few short years ago, I used to have a handful of search engines that I used to find what I needed on the web: Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler and all the "Meta" engines that would compile the results of the standard search engines (Meta-crawler was my fave). But with the exception of Yahoo, the rest have been all but eliminated from the landscape. Moreover Google has been verb-ified ("I Google, you Google, we all Google for Google"). But, but, but, but, wait it gets worse; everyone and their uncle has a Google search bar on their web-page. Google Adsense is popping up everywhere as well. Ain't a body that's anybody without a gmail account. Google maps, Google earth, and the newly minted Google Talk.

(Lunch Intermission)


So in short, it seems like these guys are setting the bar for a large chunk of the internet experience. They seem to do everything faster, better, and at less cost to the consumer. They are, in essence, what Japan was in the 1980s to the home electronics market.

I wonder what these bad-boys wil come up with next. Google iTunes?