The once little clean, uncluttered search engine is now a major presence in the lives of millions of people on this planet, and why not? After all, the objective of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page was to organize all the world's information and to make it readily available. This is indeed a pretty lofty goal, but no one can deny that they are well on their way to achieving it. But at what cost?
Book publishers, as well as the newsprint industry have taken great financial losses with the availability of their respective products via Google, as most people have made the switch to digital formats rather than the traditional physical copies. So, this is a bad thing, right? Not so, I say. Think of the environmental impact that the decreased paper consumption has due to the regular use of digital formats, both with paper production and it's eventual disposal. Tress that produce oxygen are better for the environment that tress used for newsprint.
"Better for the environment? What about all the fossil fuel consumption required to run all those storage servers for such massive quantities of data?" the Google detractors might ask. Well, Google is working on a solution to that too, as the have recently filed for a patent to manufacture data centers that would be located at sea that would take advantage of the latest in wave powered technology in order to keep those servers running. Imagine a search engine that had a symbiotic relationship with the earth itself that would give humans the ability to access critical data in a moments notice. That would by most impressive,!
As a powerful corporation, Google has the ability to have a negative impact on society, but their unofficial corporate motto of "Don't be evil!" seems to ring true in the few examples I've mentioned. I like where they're headed, and I'm interested to see what comes next.
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