Yes, the company is still growing at rates that would be the envy of the rest of the Fortune 500. But its core business is slowing, its stock is down, its Android mobile platform generates scant revenue, and competition (hello, Facebook) is fierce. Can Google find its footing in this brave new world?
The Googlers certainly know this, but in classic Innovator’s Dilemma fashion, the company seems unsure about how to move beyond the core search business that has brought it such massive success. Google has placed expensive bets on acquisitions, chief among them its $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube, a $3.1 billion wager on ad network DoubleClick, and more recently its $750 million purchase of mobile advertising platform AdMob. But none of those deals have yet significantly diversified Google’s $23-billion-a-year revenue stream:
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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
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Lately I’ve noticed quite a few unauthorized utilities tapping our Information Technology Search Portal .. not a problem really, ‘cept that we here at WebshoppeSolutions don’t make a habit of populating our index with gambling or porn sites.
Google taps our databases as well, but Google knows what it’s all about, and is very clear to only look for IT based websites in our index. Sometimes Google comes in looking for a site listing that we don’t have, and this gives us a heads up with regard to listing it.
All of the other, nafarious parsing agents are banned from tapping our index in such a way. If you’ve got a site parsing utility that goes around sniffing other indexes/databases for porn, gambling, and other such nonsense, you will be banned from accessing our domain entirely.
Lately, I’ve had the great honor to ban a great deal of ip’s/ranges, from India, Germany, and Russia, to name a few .. those who would make the feeble attempt to tap our index, all the while dropping log spam as they go.
Most who would want their Technology related website included in our index, already know the drill anyway, so tapping our index with your ever constant string of proxied ip addresses isn’t going to get you anywhere, and, using a proxy to spread your internet gutter trash won’t get you past our bans either.
WebshoppeSolutions is here for the internet community as a whole, providing trusted resources, by way of our index, to anyone who would care to learn how things on the net, their domains, and their own machines, works.
Our visitors aren’t interested in how a party was crashed in Bangalore last week at 2 oclock .. sites like that are of absolutely no use to us.
Our Information Technology Search starts right here and our LoneStarBot obeys all Robots.txt, NoIndex/NoFollow Protocols. We don’t cache pages and all of the links in our index are direct.
The French data protection authority has found passwords and email messages among the Street View Wi-Fi data Google intercepted.
Google revealed on May 14 that the fleet of vehicles it operates to compile panoramic images of city streets for its Google Maps site had inadvertently recorded traffic from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Google’s intention was only to record the identity and position of Wi-Fi hotspots in order to power a location service it operates, the company said. However, the software it used to record that information went much further, intercepting and storing data packets too.
At the time, Google said it only collected “fragments” of personal Web traffic as it passed by, because …
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