Present TenseDuring the regular episodes when I lose my keys or wallet or car, a strange impulse sometimes pops into my head: "Maybe I should Google it.", writes Shane Hegarty
When you spend so much of your life searching for answers online, it's easy to develop a deluded notion that it has an answer for everything.
We can use Google Earth to zoom from space onto our continent, our country, our town, and into our back garden (where you hope not to find a smudged picture of yourself burying a body). In the same way, there's the growing sense that when you want information about something, or someone, you can now zoom from the macro into the micro. That there's a byte for everything from a person's political leanings to the location of your lost credit card. It's ridiculous, of course. But only slightly more than Google's mission to not only give you what you need right now, but to tell you what you'll need tomorrow.
The company's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, gave a talk this week in which he stated that "the goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'." Already, it has a pretty strong iGoogle service, which allows users to personalise their search page, so that it remembers what you've searched, links to the sites you like and, should you need it, reminds you of your appointments. It already gives you ads relating to your searches. Through Gmail, it has a powerful e-mail service that many also use as an online filing cabinet.
Last month Google paid $3.1 billion (€2.3 billion) for a company called DoubleClick, which compiles information on people by combining their search habits with the "cookies" (fingerprints) they leave behind when they visit a site.
And it is developing Google Recommendations, which will tell you what it thinks you're interested in, based on your preferences and search history.
"What should you read? We are going to do a pretty good job on that," boasted Schmidt. "We could give you a reading list on the hour." This isn't so different to Amazon.com's habit of recommending items based on what you've bought before, meaning that if you picked up one electronica album four years ago you're constantly assailed with suggestions of the latest in Japanese digital bleeping.
"If you use a personal version of Google, we learn more about you and can tailor the results more and more," said Schmidt. "A little creepy sometimes, but it's a powerful notion, that a computer could understand you." A little creepy? It should atrophy the skin of every user out there. But it won't. Not simply because Google is still restricted in how long it can hold information, and exactly how it can use it. Not because, despite its power, Google still has a soft-focus image among the public. And not because most people don't care that Google censors search requests at the bequest of the truly creepy Chinese government.
No, it won't bother many people because Google is becoming both a purveyor and controller of information at a time when many are willing to hand it over. They put their lives online, categorise it into likes, dislikes, friends, family, status. Google harvests personal information, but only because it is a flourishing cash crop.
Schmidt recognised the problems this will present. "By age 21, it should be acceptable to change your name and essentially start over", something that would counteract "too much sharing at a young age" through blogs and social media such as Bebo. Eventually, he added, candidates for the US presidency will need to interview everyone they have ever met to establish what secrets lurk within their past. "The cleverer politicians will understand they should 'self-out' or 'self-describe'." Because, in the future, it won't take 30 years and a Hot Press interview to reveal that a minister for finance once puffed on a jazz cigarette.
But that propensity to hand over personal information will soon be met by Google's determination to reshape it and give it back to you. And this will cause problems of its own. What will happen when Google uses all this information to further narrow down the search, not just for information or objects, but for the right personal path? In essence, it will only be a step forward from the often dubious but usually profitable industry of self-help books and life-coaching sessions.
It's not quite an opportunity to Google your keys - more one to Google the key to your happiness. But some day soon, someone may well ask Google what job they should take. And Google will lead them down the wrong path, just as it does countless times a day already.
And as they find themselves unblocking the toilets at the irritable bowel syndrome support group, that person will be planning to go home and Google themselves a good lawyer who will put the company's conceit to the test.