Blog Response to Presentation

I presented on Thursday, January 28 on views of how Google’s practices as a business my show monopolistic behaviors to where critics and competition may make the accusation that the company is becoming a monopoly. Within the introduction I clarified what a monopoly was as well as the other kinds of ownership patterns. I further discussed Google Inc.’s use of convergence with their products and services that they offer their consumers.

I decided to bring out Google’s search engine competition to complete the point that if there is even ONE other competition for a company in the same market, then it is obviously not a monopolized industry. I did further discuss that “Google” is now a verb, since 2006, and it is simply catchy. A question from the audience that afternoon asked what “Google” meant; the term “googol” is “a number that is equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros” according to Dictionary.com (an Ask.com branch service may I add). This concept was perfect for the Stanford University students; it was their goal and mission to make their search engine have an almost infinite amount of information that would become easily accessible to the general public.

I was able to connect Dr. Campbell’s earlier presentation regarding similar concepts in the theme of my presentation as well as my fellow peers’ view on certain aspects. One of them asked me a question as to if I dug around in Google “cashing in with data mining”, a certainly new concept to me. For those who don’t know what that is—“data processing using sophisticated data search capabilities and statistical algorithms to discover patterns and correlations in large preexisting databases; a way to discover new meaning in data”, found at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/. I still haven’t been able to dig in this deeper but the student implied selling what people individual search for and essentially what the public is interested in. I do not see this in a bad light because for all the services that are free to us as web browsers I don’t see it as a problem if Google decided to let other companies know what we as consumers are looking for. This process could make a company more efficient in narrowing their audience to those who are interested in, and the consumer may save a lot of time also. But I also understand that privacy can become a real concern as well.

My time was cut a little short due to being the guinea pig so I’d like to hear some of the feed back from you guys if you wouldn’t mind:

1. Do you feel that Google has the power to become a monopoly?

2. Do you think that Bing (Powered by Microsoft) could catch up to Google’s status as a search engine?

3. What other avenues can you see Google Inc. taking on?

Thanks and Gig ‘Em

Angela Sierra