Here's a forward-thinking essay written about Google called "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web". The essay was written in 2002 and predicts what Google will look like in 2009. The article was obviously written before created AdSense (2003) and obviously before Google went public (2004). While the author predicts Google's use of semantic processing, I can assure you that the article was written before Google bought Applied Semantics (2003).
The following prediction is an exact match for Google's launch of Google Base earlier this week.
Google Marketplace Manager: The Marketplace Manager, or MM, looked like a regular spreadsheet and allowed you to list information about yourself, what you wanted to sell, what you wanted to buy, and so forth. MM was essentially an “logical statement editor,” disguised as a spreadsheet. People entered their names, addresses, and other relevant information about themselves, then they entered what they were selling, and MM saved RDF-formatted files to the server of their choice - and sent a “ping” to Google which told the search engine to update their index.
Next, here's a prediction for that turned out to be true and is now known as Google Alerts.
Google Personal Agent: Now, search is not enough. You need service. You need the computer to help you. So Google also rolled out the Personal Agent - a small piece of software that, in essence, simply queried Google on a regular basis and sent you email when it found what you were looking for on the Semweb.
Great article. But the Google hasn't displaced eBay as the world's leading marketplace and Amazon is still around, although they recently announced a drop in earnings. To be fair, the article made predictions about Google in 2009 and Google has plenty of time to put their talent and billions in cash to good work.
For other interesting predictions on Google, check out:
Google's Future? GBrowser, GooglePC, Google NetPC and Google ISP
Looking back on Google predictions made in May 2005
Interestingly, IMHO, EPIC 2014 was written just this year and is less accurate in terms of Google predictions than the 2002 essay described above. I don't think Google will buy Amazon.com. What seems more likely is that Google may be able to earn service revenue in the future by helping companies like Amazon make better use of their user data. In any case, EPIC 2014 is a slick Shockwave movie showing that Google is cool.
Comments