It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint – and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t – at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time – but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment – Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes – and extend beyond the virtual world – it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

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Chrome: last amongst equals?

I’ve used Chrome a bit – and I note that some Sandlines readers do, too – and somewhat more than the average figure shown in Drama 2.0′s report (which were 0.85% trending down to 0.77%).

But what does it offer that’s different? Currently, nothing dramatic – in fact, it misses a lot of the plugins that make Firefox my browser of choice (CoolIris, Delicious integration…).

There are some small nice-to-haves, but it feels more like a marker (some might say a line in the sand!) than a fully fledged competitive offering.

One thing seems sure: the enthusiastic “Chrome will take over the world” response to its initial (high) take up looks premature. Once again, substance will have to out over hype.

What I was hoping for was something to live up to the claim that Chrome would rethink the way we use the internet. It was going to unleash a new ability to support cloud computing. It was the browser built for the multiplex cinema experience the internet can be in today’s Web 2.0/tomorrow’s Web 3.0 world, rather than the hushed libraries of Web 1.0.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong prescription contact lenses, ’cause I can’t see it in the Chrome 1.0.

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Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!

Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?

I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.

But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about – i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.

That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone – or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.

And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.

That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.

Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.

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A friend of mine recently shared some research she’d found about levels of trust in various media. It deeply re-inforces Sandlines opinions about the shift in the balance of power from marketer to consumer in forming opinions. It makes for interesting reading, I thought. Turns our that our faith in Fleet Street is a little less than we hold in what a complete stranger with no credentials tells us in a blog.

What price your banner ad now?

Now, I’m tempted to give you a PO Box number and asking you to send me money – just in the interests of updating an experiment that was tried in a newspaper in the US last century…(which worked by the way). But maybe that’s where it all started to go wrong for that industry?

Seriously though, it does re-inforce why dedicated review sites and customer reviews on retailers sites do so well…

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