The persistence of Google

“What would we do without Google?”

We ask that question quite a bit these days in the office.

Part of it is just fun. Having a powerful search engine at your fingertips makes it much easier to identify the title of a song, for instance, when an officemate tosses you an obscure line and challenges you to name that tune. It’s more impressive if you can do it from memory, but as the great philosopher-poet Paul Simon said, “Who am I to go against the wind?”

Of course, there are more practical benefits, too. In the newspaper business, Google makes fact-checking a whole lot easier. In school, Google can be a quick jumpstart to any research project.

In 2003, Internet wonk Jim Ayson observed that the word “Google” (as a verb) had begun creeping its way into common usage, as in, “Why don’t you Google it?” In that year, the upstart had just edged out market leader Yahoo to become the most popular search engine.

Three years later, Google has pulled away, accounting for almost half of the total 5.1 billion searches in December 2005, reports Nielsen/NetRatings. In contrast, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN lost market share, dropping to 21.54 percent (1.1 billion searches) and 14 percent (553 million searches) respectively.

At the same time, the company has improved its desktop search tool for Windows PCs, Google Desktop, releasing Version 3 just last week. Despite rumors in late 2004, a Mac version doesn’t seem likely, probably because it would have to be rewritten from scratch and also because the built-in search on Mac OS X is already quite good.

I had installed Version 2 of Google Desktop last year and was amazed at how quickly it could locate documents on my home PC – once it had gone through the initial indexing process.

Version 3 adds the ability to search the contents of one computer from a second one.

“If you’ve ever created a document but forgot whether it’s on your laptop or desktop, then you can appreciate why we built this feature,” writes Kan Liu, product manager for Google Desktop in the Google blog.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, sees things differently, calling the new feature a threat to privacy.

Enabling the “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of a user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based files on Google’s own servers to enable searching from other computers, EFF warns.

“EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password,” the foundation adds.

Is the EFF view valid or is it just paranoia?

In the end, the individual user will have to decide.

Personally, I have a problem with having my personal files copied onto some remote server that I don’t control. Many companies ought to worry about this feature too, because their confidential Word or Excel documents might end up being viewed by unauthorized third parties.

Fortunately, the feature is easy to turn off. In fact, when I installed the latest version of Google Desktop, the feature was turned off by default.

Even without Desktop, Google is likely to grow in importance wherever search is concerned. Already, it’s indispensable to those of us who use information extensively at work.

Somewhere down the road, this might cause other problems. Given the axiom “Use it or lose it,” my worry is about Google’s impact on people’s memories. How much information will we still store “locally” – in our heads – if the data is so readily available on the network? What then becomes of the advice to “preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you?”