Assignment 3

As far as search engines are concerned Google is the top player without any close competition. The company of Google itself is an extremely innovative place where they encourage their employees to create new ideas for the company to test out. Google also has an onsite masseuse for their employees. The only close competitor to Google is Yahoo, and they are not really that close in my eyes. Google has been on top of their game for some time and they are ahead of the times with such applications such as Google Earth, Google maps 360 and many more. Now Microsoft wants to get involved in this game and they recently attempted to buyout Yahoo with an impressive offer; however, they were turned down. This comes as a blow to Microsoft as they are involved in pretty much anything that works with computers and they are a mega corporation. They are not used to being told no, just like the bully in the schoolyards. In an effort to compete with Google, they are going to try to “buyout” the stockholders of Yahoo in an effort to have a leadership switch which would essentially allow Microsoft to buy them out. Microsoft has the funds to do this and much more, but waging this proxy war would be considerably cheaper for them by about $20 billion. Even if they do merge, I don’t think that they will be able to come close to Google. Google is too much on their A game right now and there is no signs of them slowing down.
Google just rolled out some plans for the G phone in an effort to one up Apple. They are planning to release the phone not just in one style but in multiple different styles to accommodate all of the potential users. It is not just one phone, but it is going to be the ability to bend the phone to do whatever you want it to do through the course of Android, an open platform for mobile phones. This is going to be huge to the industry and the world. Having a phone that will do pretty much whatever you want it to do is amazing. Obviously this is a ways off from now, but I think this will really secure Google’s top spot in the world.
There is a way that the Deep web is becoming more and more accessible, Yahoo added a subscription like feature that searches those kind of websites. The deep web are those websites that do not pop up on search engines, they are seemingly hidden in the deep wires of the internet, much like the far reaches of space, it hasn’t been fully explored. There are algorithms being developed to search for these sites, but the best way so far has been through human who relies on people to just sit and basically click on links and fall deeper down the rabbit hole. There is still tons of information out there that most of us have yet to see and the trick is to find a different method for crawling these sites so they can be more easily searched.
My take on this is that corporate America and the capitalists don’t want certain information to be out there, while at the same time preaching freedom of speech. I think corporate ethics play a huge role in the internet as websites are being closed down because they mad “someone unhappy”. I think that this is crap, we should not be limited to what we can post and read on the net, regardless of the content, that is what the back button feature is for.