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DECEMBER 16, 2003
By Alex Salkever Google Here, There, and Everywhere As the search giant keeps expanding into new services, it's becoming a rival to just about every other Net company out there I woke up this morning and Googled my dry cleaner to see if my shirts were done. Then I Googled the weather to see what to wear to work. Before breakfast, I Googled my stocks to see how they did yesterday, and then I Googled the supermarket for sale prices and to schedule a delivery, right from Google. I Googled the movies playing at theaters near my house, and then I told Google to e-mail me with travel itineraries to Paris from June 24 through June 31. In short, it's just another good Google day here in 2006, in an all-Google world. Of course, none of these services are offered yet on Google. But they could be soon, because the world's biggest and most successful search engine is rapidly headed in that direction. You can already Google your boss, Google a phone number, Google an address, Google the best place to buy a pet salamander, Google the latest news, Google the meaning of the word "philistine," and Google the closest pizza place to your apartment. On Dec. 12, the Google gurus introduced yet another useful information service. Web surfers can now check the delivery status of their FedEx (FDX ) packages from Google.com or any Google desktop toolbar. Just enter "FedEx" and the tracking number in a single search field. Up pops a link to the FedEx.com Web page that holds all your tracking information. NO DEAL NEEDED. The same function can also track United Parcel Service (UPS ) numbers, patent numbers, or even Federal Aviation Administration airline-registration numbers, and Federal Communications Commission equipment numbers. While the last two have little mass-market appeal, they illustrate how Google is beginning to flex its muscles in tapping into data sets available on the Web. Perhaps more important, Google is providing this new shipment tracking service even though it doesn't have a partnership with FedEx. Rather, Google engineers have reprogrammed it to query FedEx directly with the information a user enters and provide the hyperlink direct to the customer's information. No doubt, this is an ingenious way to keep people at Google longer. By extension, the search giant can create more online real estate to sell ads on. But with every new service, Google takes a slice of someone else's pie. Its ability to find pizza places within any given Zip code ultimately eliminates the use of YellowPages. Using it to find word definitions diminishes the business proposition of online dictionaries. STICKIER AND STICKIER. Taken to its logical extension of providing an interface for every popular service or sector on the Web, Google becomes the omnipresent middleman and a clear and present danger to just about any company that relies on the Internet for commerce. Which, increasingly, is every company in the developed world. This is, of course, a very good thing for Google. Successful services make it stickier and in turn garner more revenues and leverage to charge advertisers ever increasing rates or just to keep rates the same and rake in more money. Google's onward march also means it'll face some contentious competition in 2004 and beyond as the prospect of Google everywhere, doing everything, starts to really hit home. Not that this is a particularly new strategy. Yahoo! (YHOO ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and America Online (TWX ), among others, have built businesses around providing all things to all people on their respective portals and site networks. From its front page, Yahoo provides links for job hunters, love seekers, home buyers, and astrology freaks. And this year it tweaked its Web site to return links it believes are intuitive matches for search terms. For example, if you type in "Hawaii," then one of the links Yahoo returns is for weather, and another is for booking travel to Hawaii.
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