Google. Who's looking at you?
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The Sunday Times
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PostPosted: Sun, Oct 21 2007, 3:33 pm EDT    Post subject: Google. Who's looking at you? Reply with quote

From The Sunday Times
October 21, 2007

Google. Who's looking at you?

It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?

John Arlidge

In the blissed-out California sunshine, the glistening glass-and-steel curves of the Googleplex seem to sweep you up off the pavement with the promise of a glimpse into the future – and a good time. It is 8am on a Monday morning and battalions of high-tech foot soldiers arrive at the gilded palace of the online revolution. Laptops and lattes in hand, they step off conga lines of biodiesel-powered buses, chatting loud and fast about the latest skyrocketing Silicon Valley start-ups, which have names that sound like Teletubbies: Jajah, Orgoo, Ningo. Geek by geek, they head inside to begin surfing and controlling the quadrillions of bytes of information that surge through Google’s giant servers, and which crash on to our desktops and mobile phones every minute of every day.

The sidewalk outside Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, 40 minutes’ drive south of San Francisco, is about as close as most people get to a company that has cornered the market in internet searching and become the killer app of the modern information economy. For all its success, Google is a closed system, as impenetrable as its complex search algorithms.

Its multibillionaire founders, Sergey Brin, 34, and Larry Page, 34, scarcely do interviews, and reporters rarely make it through the company’s doors to talk to top executives. But the dome-headed maths nerds are facing their first big setback. Suddenly, they need to talk. So, a few weeks ago they invited The Sunday Times into the heart of the search industrial complex.

Google likes to think of itself as “crunchy” – wholesome and worthy – and, walking into the Googleplex, it looks, at first sight, a pretty crunchy kind of place. There’s free coffee and muesli in the No Name breakfast cafe. Everyone gets around the campus on free bicycles. In the car park, the canopies that protect the neat ranks of hybrid Toyota Priuses from the sun are made from solar panels that power each building in the 1.5-million-sq-ft complex. There are swimming pools, massage chairs and free medical checkups. A model of Sir Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo prototype commercial spacecraft hangs from the rafters in the lobby. This is rocket science, after all.
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http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2688404.ece
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