What should google do?

If you were Google and you wanted to compound the greatness, what would you do? That was my question. Notice I didn’t ask what they should do to make more money or have more impact or just make the contributor’s life better.

I think Google is terrific, I use it a hundred times a day, but it’s very, very transparent. That, of course, is part of its appeal. Google doesn’t have a point of view or much of an experience. You tell it what you want and –boom- it disappears and replaces itself with what you asked for.

That’s a great experience, but it’s not the foundation for a great business. Being transparent in a world where there’s no real long-term barrier to entry is a risky business. If someone else introduced a quantum leap in search, something with a great value proposition, sexy interface and clever name, there’s nothing at all Google could do to keep people from walking out. There’s no switching cost.

I want to talk about how to make Google permanent and powerful and profitable and useful, all at the same time. Start with the fact that Google has no permission to talk to me. At all. They don’t even know who I am.

So, if Google asks me if they can watch what I search for and email me every three weeks if they find something I might like, I’d say yes. So would 50 million other people.

Now, Google has the ability to find things on behalf of its audience. It could go to Whirpool and say, “We have three million people who searched for ‘energy efficient refrigerator’ last week. If you give us a 5% rebate coupon, we’ll email it to them.”

Notice that this power-inverting relationship only works if Google realizes that they’re working for the user, not the advertiser. If they pit advertisers against each other to get the very best deal on behalf of me and other users, I’m all for it.