Google, the most popular search engine for finding out information aboutother people, is setting up shop in Dublin. Shane Hegarty (AussieArmy Sgt, under-14 GAA hurling star or Irish journalist)gets Googled.
Do you ever get the feeling that you are being Googled? Perhaps you're walking the dog or cooking the dinner and suddenly a chill raises the hairs on the back of your neck and it feels like somebody, somewhere is ransacking through your personality.
Worse, somebody may Google you, only to pull up information on somebody with the same name but a whole other life. That person could be an air force pilot or a convicted murderer, a good footballer or a head-the-ball. How will they be able to tell the difference between the real you and all your namesakes scattered around the web, being reported on, written about, eulogised and scandalised?
Could it be that you are being Googled by somebody you haven't seen in years? Or is it somebody you have yet to meet? The date fixed up for Saturday night, a job interviewer, that person who stares at you on the bus each Monday morning?
What right does someone have to Google you anyway? Or should you be flattered that someone has that much interest in you? Is there something terribly lonely about being unGoogled in this universe? Is the only thing worse than being Googled, not being Googled at all?
There are plenty of search engines on the Internet, but only one has become a common verb. It is Google, which this week announced it would base its European Operations Centre in Dublin. It is the first brand of the Internet age to become a proprietary eponym, which is about to join Hoover, Xerox and Walkman in losing the initial capital letter en route to the dictionary.
Its lawyers are not so sanguine about common language cutting across their commercial interest, and have sent cease-and-desist letters to one website that catalogues new words. They're wasting their time, of course. You can't sue the English language.
Perhaps people don't Google so much on this side of the Atlantic, where the Internet is not quite so pervasive and neither is the complex dating culture. In the US, it has become common for a person to do a background check on a date before walking out the door to meet them. Is he who he says he is? Is he good at what he does? What do other people think of him?
Parents might use it to check up on a new doctor or how successful past pupils of a particular school have been. Newspaper advice columns deal with the very modern moral dilemma: Is Googling OK?
"I'm for it," counsels the New York Times Magazine's The Ethicist column, "but then again I have to be: I've done it. And many other people have, too; that's why the verb 'to Google' is now a familiar neologism . . . Had your friend laboured all afternoon at the courthouse checking equally public information on her date, she'd have crossed the border between casual curiosity and stalking. Her Googling, however, was akin to asking her friends about this fellow - offhand, sociable and benign." All they are doing, of course, is "browsing", but it is an indication of the dominance of Google that the traditional word has been pushed aside and replaced by a label. It also raises questions of how benign a company can be when it knows so much. 80 per cent of all Internet searches are done through Google. You may not even realise that you are using it. If you search using Alta Vista or Yahoo, you are really using Google. 150 million searches a day.
10,000 machines at its Silicon Valley headquarters are storing what amounts to a collective memory for the developed world. It knows what web pages are visited and what people do when they are there. It stores old web pages and in 2001 bought old Usenet archives, that include 20 years worth of discussions, with 700 million postings on 35,000 topical categories dating back to 1981. Google knows a lot about people. It knows a lot about you.
The Google story begins as an archetypal start-up tale of the dot.com boom. In 1998 two Stanford PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were so frustrated with search engines and how searches often threw up utterly irrelevant suggestions, that they decided to devise their own system. From a suburban garage, they created a search engine that was more intelligent, that tried to look at and filter web pages in the same a way a human being would (see panel).
They raised money quickly. Brin recalls a meeting with Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. "We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a cheque? It was made out to Google Inc, and was for $100,000." The company raised $1m in 1998 and a further $25m in venture capital the following year, but has not needed to raise any further cash since. In 2001 it pulled in an estimated $65m. There had been talk of a stock exchange flotation, but that has been put on hold.
Google earns money by selling its software to other search engines and through advertising. Not the banner advertising and pop-up irritants that blight the web, but through matching advertising with searches in an unobtrusive way. For example, if you search for concert tickets, discreetly alongside the results appear ads for companies that will sell them to you.
The web page itself is simple. Just a Google logo, a box to enter your search and a couple of links if you want extra information. It is deceptively primitive. Using Google is like opening a barn door and finding a power plant on the other side.
Those soon to be employed at Google's Dublin offices may enjoy working in a place that is that hybrid of corporate nous and hippy commune so popular before realism and bankruptcy set into the new economy. The affectionate name for its California headquarters is the Googleplex. There is a piano in the lobby, lava lamps in the corridors and multi-coloured exercise balls rolling about the floor. There are games of roller-hockey in the car park and an in-house masseur to deal with any injuries.
The name Google is a corruption of the word googol, the number represented by a one followed by 100 zeros and an obvious boast of the amount of information within reach. In the lobby, a screen scrolls through a handful of the thousands of searches being made every second. Lights flash on an atlas to indicate the countries accessing Google. The engine now indexes over three billion web pages, and searchers can find what they want in 86 different languages, including impeccable Irish as well as cutesy contrivances such as Elmer Fudd and Klingon. On one wall of the Googleplex, there is a chart that shows the growth in users from 1998 to now. It rises from a valley to a mountain.
In only four years, then, Google has risen from a rough experiment in a garage to one of the world's most powerful companies. It still hides behind its status as underdog, a small company bringing a useful tool to people in a tough environment; but it employs 500 people, earns millions and even worries governments. Last September, China blocked access to Google within the country, seeing it as a threat to its authority. As one commentator pointed out, it may have had something to do with the fact that if you searched for the name of the country's Prime Minister, the 14th ranked option was an interactive game called Slap The Evil Dictator Jiang Zemin. It led to consternation in China, and after ten days the largest authoritarian state on earth backed down and unblocked access even if it still filters certain results. Search for Jiang Zemin today, though, and that game still comes in as the 15th highest option.
"It does underscore how important they are," says Danny Sullivan of online magazine Search Engine Watch. "Alta Vista were banned at the same time, but nobody paid any attention to that. In fact, Alta Vista had to send out press releases reminding people that they'd been banned too. By the same token, search engines like Alltheweb, which gives the same information, were not banned. Google, though, got all the press." Lowly users as much as big governments are now questioning Google's power. A web site, Google Watch (www.google-watch.org), has been set up and warns that Google is developing into a proper Big Brother. "Google," it admonishes, "is not your friend." It is a "privacy time bomb", tracking the habits of the entire world, yet remaining largely unaccountable.
It argues: "Young, stupid script kiddies and many bloggers still think Google is 'way kool', so by now Google enjoys a 75 per cent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. No webmaster can avoid seeking Google's approval these days . . . If he tries to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalised by Google, and his traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalised sites. Google is completely unaccountable." Yet, even Google Watch resists the air of hysteria now infecting other reports. A recent BBC article claimed: "Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is." Danny Sullivan discounts this. Google, he says, only knows that somebody using a particular computer on a particular day sought certain information, but can't always be sure of who that person was. It could gain more personal data on you, but it would have to compel your Internet provider to give that information.
As the US government rolls back personal rights in its fight against terrorism, he says, it's what Google might be ordered to do with their information that users should be most worried about. "Critics are right in that there's a lot of data there. It's not that Google are giving out information, only that someone could go in and force them to do it against their own policies. It's an issue where you should watch the government rather than the company." The same articles, he says, were being written about Yahoo in the late 1990s, before it waned. Besides, Google will not hold its dominance forever. Users are not restricted in the search engines they use. The technology behind Google is no longer so far ahead of its competitors, and while it was voted Brand of the Year 2003, the loveability factor that has got it so far so quickly shows signs of waning under the company's dominance. Also, recent expansion into the vast network of personal opinion pages - a practice called "blogging" - dilutes the company's original focus.
I asked to speak to a member of senior management at Google, and was repeatedly promised that David Krane, director of Corporate Communications, would call back. But he didn't. So I Googled him.
This is what he has said of how the information is stored: "As a policy, this information is confidential." Those seeking a job at the Dublin office may like to know that, "We've always run this as a very conservative, cost-conscious business. We pay our employees well, but not off the charts." I was unable to find out much else about him, although he may also be "Broadway's leading composer of dance" or a character in a Ray Liotta movie.
Perhaps, though, he Googled me and decided he didn't want to talk to me.
It's a very modern conundrum indeed.