Saturday, July 1, 2006

Google All Goes Live (Blog Post From July 1st, 2022)
By Philipp Lenssen, Jr.

Google today on Google.com unveiled Google All, a new website merging all of its products into a single search box. Previously, you had to click the different homepage links to go to services such as Google Maps, Google Person Info, Google Brain Scan, or Google Where’s My Robot.

Google All, a service expected to be in Zeta for the coming year, follows up on visions put forth by the late Sergey Brin. To quote Sergey from 2011: “We expect our artificial intelligence search solutions to really take off within the next decade. It’s a complicated problem, but it’s something we try very, very hard to bring to people.”

A first test-drive of Google All shows the AI is matured indeed, along the lines of what Yahoozon is doing with their Super Search efforts released last month. When you enter e.g. “who did I meet on New Year’s 2020”, Google All will show a list of names, with individual addresses and such pulled from Google Person Info (provided you installed the Google Brain Scan body extension, of course).

Other services though are not easily triggered, which was a bit disappointing. For example, I entered my address (Atlantis Road 133, Sub-Water Sector 15) but no instant satellite images were shown. Admitted, this might be a rendering bug with Firefox 10 Alpha.

Now, there are some privacy issues with this new service. Google in their All FAQ states:

Like with other Google services, you can opt-out of Google All at any time. (...) It’s Google’s policy to not scan the brains of people who do not want to be scanned. If you believe your brain has been affected by invalid scans, please contact one of our Service Robots. (You’ll get a personal response within 60 seconds.)

For example, I entered “what’s my neighbor Ronald up to”, and the Google All result revealed that he’s having an affair for the last 5 months, his wife completely unsuspecting. Now I’m sure this is just a misconfiguration in Ronald’s implant, but these things are bound to happen. Maybe Google should ponder doing such services in opt-in, not opt-out fashion?

In other news today, the Google employee who was recently fired for blogging about details of the Google space mission (Codename Borg) has gone missing without trace, his family announced. Marissa Page was not available for comments at this time.

Google All Goes Live (Blo ... by Philipp Lenssen, Jr ... | Comments (24)

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