Do you live in a Google world?

So everyday you leave your house at 8:00 to go to work, catch the train, then take a cab or walk down to your office to just be in on time. You do this day in and day out and nearly everyday you manage to bump into the same people whom you have been seeing every other day or two, and you say to yourself "we live in a small world" and move on.

Has your Internet experience starting to give you the same feel? Like always you log on to the Internet, go to google.com, search for information on a particular topic and as you go about visiting the webpages, discussion groups and chat rooms you start to realize that the people whom you found posting messages on the other websites are the same people hanging around here too, and you’d say to yourself, "It’s a small world out here too". To that I’d say "Welcome to Googleworld."

Google is by far the most popular search engine and probably every other person on the net uses Google directly or indirectly to search for information. But what people are failing to realize is that the more they use Google the more they are restricting themselves to a very very small part of the internet (3,307,998,701 web pages to be precise at the time of writing this article which have been indexed by Google). Although there is no doubt that Google is one of the best search engines and its algorithms are the best, it is still no where close to indexing flash and java enabled websites or websites with a lot of content in graphic form.

Probably that’s why you never see a cool flash site or a graphically heavy, very good looking site coming out of Google's search results.

Well some might say, "Oh I don’t use Google, I use Yahoo or say XYZ search engine so I don’t have to fear of being caged in the Googleworld…."

To that I’d say, "Pray, think again". Many of the popular search engines including Yahoo use Google search technology so if you go to Yahoo and search for a particular topic it will throw up the exact same search result as Google would because it is using Google’s search APIs and so would a few thousand other search engines currently present on the Internet.

So what's wrong in living in a Google world… well to be honest nothing really as of now except for the fact that you’ll need to be content with just a few sites and not being able to see the vastness of the real internet. However this un-forced monopoly which Google is starting to enjoy could be easily misused by people to create havoc over the Internet the very same way hackers are misusing Microsoft and Outlook Express’s monopoly to create every possible virus, worm or Trojans to cause worldwide havoc.

I’d say the misuse of Google’s monopoly has already started. Google Bombing which is relatively new today is an excellent example of how Google’s fool proof search algorithms can be used to your own advantage. If not nipped in the bud Google bombing would be used to direct website users to a particular page from where viruses or Trojans could be triggered. It would also be used by companies to redirect visitors searching for their competitors to either their own site to a fake site spurting blasphemy against their competitors. While Google is putting up a bold not so worried face on the front, I’m sure their engineers are working 48 hours a day to find a way to fix this.

To sum it up using Google is never a bad thing but its always better to broaden your horizons and try take a peek into to unexplored vast oceans of the internet. So the next time your boss asks you to research on a particular topic try using some other engine, I’m sure you’ll have something different from the rest at the next day’s staff meeting.