Google As The Operating System To The Internet

from the it's-the-interface dept

Now that everyone is talking about the latest Google-trick where you can easily track FedEx or UPS shipments by typing in the tracking number on Google, one more piece of the puzzle fell into place in the "Google vision." Over at Business Week, they describe a world where Google is everywhere. Instead of going anywhere online directly, you could just use Google as the interface. Need movie tickets? Type "Movie" and your zip code and see the listings. Want to buy a Beanie Baby on eBay? Type "ebay beanie baby" and have Google show you all the choices. As the article points out, each one of these types of moves could take away traffic from some other site, taking away advertising revenue and giving it to Google. Clearly, Google is trying to become something of an "operating system" for the internet. It's trying to set it up so that if you want to find anything or run any web application, you go directly to Google and input what you want. It's a sort of super sophisticated command line interface, where you just need to remember a few simple commands - and let Google's smarts figure out the rest. It's an interesting idea, and can certainly appeal to plenty of geeks (including myself). However, there are reasons why the vast majority of people tend to prefer a nice simple graphical user interface rather than a command line - and it will be interesting to see if others (notably Microsoft and Yahoo) figure out a way to appeal to those who are less interested in a command line interface to the world.
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  • identicon
    searcher, 16 Dec 2003 @ 2:17am

    But...

    that's what I do already! When I want something I just make up a google query for it. Sadly all the advertising hits that google puts up first sometimes get in the way (I filter actual ads) but it's still easier than trying to work round most other site's crappy search engines. The trick is to be abel to come up with good searches - and that I susepct that that is the stumbling block : most people just aren't very good at it. What we might see is sites providing special front ends to google for generating queries. (I know that there are people doing that already, but I am talking much more tailored)

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Tony Preston, 16 Dec 2003 @ 9:56am

    Google is good...

    Essentially, your describing my search methods.
    I have google as my home page and most often use one or two word searches.

    I have been doing this for a couple of years, Before Google, I did it with AltaVista.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    James, 17 Dec 2003 @ 11:06am

    The geeks are there

    I, too, already use Google as a general-purpose locator, and do my searches from a Windows cmd prompt.

    I have assorted Ruby scripts that run site or topic-specific searches with given keywords.

    Makes it much easier to find a movie on IMDB, getAPI help for some programming langauge, lookup speling and meaning of words, and so on, instead of first opeing a browser, navigating to one or more sites, and futzing with some half-assed form UI.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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