These past few months, we have witnessed the
meteoric rise of
Google. It started as a "second-rate, trying hard copycat" to
Yahoo as a meta-search engine. But from its lowly beginnings, Google seems to be bent on taking over the world -- and overtaking "The Monopoly" from
Microsoft!
It started with the beta version of
GMail (Google Mail). It was quite revolutionary when it was first introduced -- the first *free* webmail service that offered 1 Gigabyte of mail storage. During those times, both
Yahoo Mail and
Hotmail only offered a just a "few" megabytes of mail storage. Since that time, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail had followed suit by offering larger mail storage but GMail retorted by doubling its already massive storage.
A few weeks ago, Google introduced its first version of "
Google Talk" -- an Instant Messaging (IM) client that doubles as Voice Over IP (
VOIP) client. Although its entry in the IM arena is rather late, "Google Talk" is shaping up as a formidable challenger to both
Yahoo Messenger and
MSN Messenger since Google Talk is in its early beta version. The current version of Google Talk is pretty simple and since its still in beta, there are not a lot of options available to users but I'm sure that succeeding versions will be awesome! (is the google fan in me showing?)
Between Google search and Google Talk, the Google Laboratories has been quietly researching on other internet applications such as an
online web translator, a
portal, "
Google Desktop", "
Froogle" (a price comparison internet application) and
other esoteric research projects.
The phenomenal growth of Google has some conspiracy theorists jittery. It's a well known fact that Google stores all queries on their search engines in a cache and they also send/store cookies to people who use them, therefore, Google knows what you have been searching for and some people are weary on how they are going to use this information. With 2 Gigabytes of mail that can be indexed and sorted, Google has all these information about you. Google Talk is using a
Jabber server and Jabber servers have back-end databases, who knows how long Google stores all your conversations for later perusal?
With all these information on hand on millions of internet users, I go back to the title of this entry: Is Google Bent on Taking Over the World?
