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Fiber, Glasses, and Cars: We're Nearing Peak Google

Google will not rest until we can spend every waking hour searching and looking at ads. That moment is upon us.
Sergey Brin wants to own your life. Image: Paul Sakuma/AP

Obviously every single one of Google's "oh man, look at the crazy thing Google's doing now" projects is expressly designed to enable we awed proclaimers to use more Google. Which is cool; Google's a business, and of course it's on a perpetual quest to get us to buy/use more of its stuff.

Free Google wifi in Chelsea: maximum Googling for thousands. Fiber-optic web in Kansas: super-fast Googling for the middle-American citizenry. Google Glasses: all Google, all the time.

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Meanwhile, Google's primary business model has deviated little from its original ad-based approach: the more people Google, the more ads they see, the more money Google makes. It's not rocket science. And since Google won the first battle—everyone uses Google as their de facto search engine (shush, pro-Bing guy)—Google has had no choice but to bend the built environments that we inhabit to be more Google-friendly. All of the above examples clearly apply.

But here's one I hadn't thought of: Google's driverless cars. Over at MIT's Technology Review, Antonio Regalado muses that Google may in fact be spearheading the hands-off driving experience to keep searcher's hands on their iPads or laptops or, ideally, Androids. Regalado does some unscientific number-crunching and guesses that freeing commuters' hands would add up to an additional 23,514,400,000 hours spent on Google each year—which he supposes could be worth around $2 billion of internet ad-gazing in the American market.

Whether that's right or not—it does make a certain amount of intuitive sense, but then again you get the sense that the Google boys sometimes just go all-in on something they think is cool and then later justify it with their all encompassing ad schemata, or then again maybe that playful and adventurous reputation is in fact carefully cultivated by Google's no doubt expert and expensive PR team—it speaks to a fascinating trend. Just think about how crazy that is: Google wants to fundamentally alter the fabric of transportation across the nation, ultimately, in essence, to deliver more eyeballs to ads. Maybe there really is a framed screenshot from the mall scene in Minority Report over Sergey Brin's office.

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Google is now actively attempting to exert influence on every single possible consumer environment. It is drastically altering physical infrastructure to keep us happy and Googling, and really, clicking on ads. It has conquered in-office environments, coffee shops and private homes. It is winning city streets and driver seats. If it succeeds with the Glasses, it's an instant win over all of the above, all at once. One step closer to a totally ad-supported living environment. Which of course is why this Google Glasses parody ad was so on the nose:

Google will not rest until we're staring at ads every second of the day. It's the only way the company can continue to grow, so as long as its revenue flows primarily from Search and targeted ads. One day, when there are pop-up millimeters from our eyeballs and ads on our laps on the highway, when every plausible moment may possibly be given over to Googling, it will eventually hit a dead end.

Yeah, the day is in sight when Google will have saturated every environ and squeezed every node point in the daily routine for ad-juice. We are approaching Peak Google. It may be further off than some analysts suspect—many analysts were not counting on Google to start building new vehicles and urban playspaces to expand their market share. But it's certainly in sight. When it finally arrives, Google will face its long-foretold and ultimate challenge: decoupling its information provision from ad sales. Can it be done? If Google wants information to truly be free, as it has always claimed it does, it may eventually recognized that there's a cumbersome cost to the clutter of ads—a drag sail on the ultimate user experience—and it may yet find away.