This Week In Google: From Desktop To Demo

It's only February, but it's becoming apparent that Google is going to dominate the news of 2006 much like another well-known vendor did 10 years ago. (Hint: They're in Redmond, Wash.)

In January, the Google buzz centered on news that the U.S. Justice Department had been seeking search data from the search engine giant and from Yahoo, MSN, and America Online. Google received a good chunk of positive press for resisting the government subpoena. (A court hearing to determine if Google will have to turn over search records is scheduled for March 17.)

Google also got some highly favorable video coverage, when ABC Worlds News Tonight anchor Bob Woodruff visited the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and interviewed the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, on ABC's January 20 broadcast.

Woodruff followed up with a vlog addition to the newscast segment, in which he toured Google and offered some gee-whiz commentary. "One of the things that first strikes you about this company is that it seems to be unlike any others," he says in the beginning of the vlog piece. "Check out this office; it's got toys everywhere. Is this for creativity?" (Woodruff is currently recovering from injuries he received in a Jan. 29 explosion in Iraq.)

Almost a week ago, Google took something of a media ribbing when news reports filtered back from Brazil that Page and Brin, visiting that South American country to meet with local software engineers and Google employees, had a credit card rejected when they attempted to settle a $50 tab in a Rio de Janeiro restaurant.

This week, a more substantive slew of Google stories, in terms of potential e-commerce impact, hit the Web.Leading the list is a speculative article from the online Times of London, asserting that Google is looking to build its own private alternative to the Internet. The article cites unnamed sources; the Times Online quotes a Google spokesperson denying that the company has any such plans. (The NY Post weighs in with a similar story, here.)

Google may be looking to get its hooks in another hot business. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is preparing a PayPal competitor. The story says the search giant is developing an online payments service, called GBuy. The thinking is that GBuy could constitute a potent alternative to PayPal, which has 96 million account holders and holds 24 percent of the U.S. online payments market, according to the story. The story adds the Google has pretty much admitted publicly that it's looking at online payments, however it has also denied it is seeking to compete with PayPal; Google declined to comment to the Journal.

This week's DEMO conference in Phoenix also loomed large in the Google landscape. Although Google itself wasn't present at the show, InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn reports that the search behemoth cast a large shadow over the proceedings. "Of more than 30 startups making their debut on Tuesday at the showcase for new technologies, about a third positioned Google's search results as the problem and their products as the solution," Claburn reports.

The startups he limns include Gravee, BiggerBoat, Krugle, and Kaboodle, among others.Even established companies have good reason to tread lightly where Google is concerned. The Web site of German automaker BMW and office-products vendor Ricoh were initially dropped from Google's index, then added back in.

The wrath of Google was purportedly raised by the sites' use of doorway pages, which are used to boost a site's search-engine ranking. Both BMW and Ricoh were put back in Google's good graces after they removed their doorway pages.Toward the end of this week, no story loomed larger than Google's desktop efforts. On Thursday came word of Google Desktop 3. The upgraded version of Google's information-organization tool is being seen as a potential challenge to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. (In his blog entry, InformationWeek's Tom Smith provides some additional insight into Google Desktop.)

Google is getting additional traction on the desktop from its apparently blossoming relationship with PC powerhouse Dell. The two companies confirmed that Dell is testing a pre-installed package of Google software on Dell computers.