Google has introduce maps, mail, desktop searches and blog searches recently. The conventional wisdom is that they provide these free toys that are either fun or useful and show little ads and links with the delivery of these free services. Hugely successful, these ads make Google a lot of money, and everybody is happy.
The problem is, when you seach the web on Google, if you have your pc indexed by their proprietary tool, results from your own files are displayed along with the web search results.
Google knows what's on your pc and can get it if they want. But they probably don't want to, and probably don't need to. The commercial power of Google in future will be tracking your behaviour across the portfolio of Google services.
The commercial uses of the different types of information Google processes are staggering, once they are combined. If Google knows what place you search for and the results of your subsequent search for transportation, they can show you an ad for a taxi service and a hotel at your destination. This is cool. They could make it all permission based and ask you to allow them to intuitively select ads for services related to your recent activity. Heck, I'd say yes and Google scares me.
My fear is that Google may not always be used for commercial purposes. More later.
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