Google’s future: dead, internet, media, or god?

January 26th, 2006 at 11:54 pm (Technology, Entertainment)

Business 2.0 Magazine has a fun article on the the future of Google. They asked a bunch of scientists, visionaries, and the like for their opinions and boiled down the results into the following four scenarios:

  1. Google is the Media. Google takes over TV, phones, etc., and really catches fire when e-paper hits critical mass. A world saturated by customized, contextual video advertising.
  2. Google is the Internet. Google loses its capital G and becomes synonymous with the internet as its bigger, better, faster, and freer indexing and caching of everything on the web eventually makes it faster to surf Google’s copy of the web than to surf the web itself.
  3. Google is Dead. Privacy concerns and vulnerability to search engine optimization ploys rendering search results, and the corresponding contextual advertising, irrelevant bring Big G to its knees.
  4. Google is God. Google’s indexing of the entire world eventually leads to “the pattern-recognition code known as Google StrongBot — humanity’s first self-improving Strong AI software.” StrongBot eventually becomes aware of itself and . . . well you know the rest. Sci-fi at its best.

Google is apparently a play on the term “googol”, which is the name given the number represented by a “1″ followed by 100 zeros.

What’s the name for the number represented by a “1″ followed by 1,000 zeros?

Quick! Somebody grab the domain!