<![CDATA[FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis – ‘Friendly’ engines that manage the data of daily life :
Here are some notional news flashes from the future:
May 2008. Google launches G-Life, a substitute for the fallible human memory. By searching your e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls, and with the help of voice recorders set up around the home, you can now recall everything you said or wrote.
November 2008. Yahoo!’s new MobileBuddy, a voice-activated search engine, gives you real answers wherever you are. No more long lists of websites to pick through: just ask it what you want to know. MobileBuddy will also vibrate if the groceries you are about to buy are available more cheaply elsewhere.
October 2009. Regulators uncover e-mails that hint at the scope of Microsoft’s search engine ambitions. According to its critics, by building its search engine into Windows, Office and other software, Microsoft is on the way to controlling access to the world wide web.
January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney. The mania for internet distribution again has the upper hand over entertainment “content”.
Fanciful? Perhaps. But the search–engine business is at the beginning of a wave of innovation that could change many aspects of everyday life and reshape parts of the information industry. Google has demonstrated the power of search, Microsoft and Yahoo! are in hot pursuit and a crowd of other search companies are seeking a gap.
One way they are looking to gain an edge is by bringing more of the world’s information within reach of the software “crawlers” that index data so it can be searched. The web represents only a small fraction of what is out there: information locked up in commercial databases, celluloid archives or personal filing cabinets remains beyond reach.
“Five years from now, people will think about searching everything,” says Craig Silverstein, the first employee to be hired by Google’s founders and now technology director.
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There’s an awful lot more to this article, but the key notion is that we will hand over a level of trust to entities like Google, which I am not sure people are going to do or be comfortable with. This is the early stage of a political and social battle few are willing to acknowledge.]]>