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with the quality of the dating pool, I was at least able to warn my friend about this

guy's violent past. -Testimonial from Google user

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I am completely delighted with the translation service. My partner arranged for two

laborers to come and help with some demolition. There was a miscommunication: she

asked for the workers to come at 11 am, and the labor service sent them at 8:30. They

speak only Spanish, and I speak English and some French. Our Hispanic neighbors were

out. With the help of the translation service, I was able to communicate with the

workers, to apologize for the miscommunication, establish the expectation, and ask

them to come back at 11. Thank you for providing this connection . . . Thank you Google.

-Testimonial from Google user

I just want to thank Google for teaching me how to find love. While looking for my

estranged brother, I stumbled across a Mexican Web site for male strippers-and I was

shocked. My brother was working as a male prostitute! The first chance I got, I flew

to the city he was working in to liberate him from this degrading profession. I went

to the club he was working at and found my brother. But more than that, I met one

of his co-workers . . . We got married last weekend [in Mexico], and I am positive

without Google's services, I never would have found my brother, my husband, or the

surprisingly lucrative nature of the male stripping industry in Mexico!! Thank you,

Google!

-Testimonial from Google user

Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, has a certain Epcot Cen

ter feel to it-so many fun space age toys to play with, so little time. In one corner

is a spinning globe that emits light beams based on the volume of people searching

on Google. As you would expect, most of the shafts of light are shooting up from North

America, Europe, Korea, Japan, and coastal China. The Middle East and Africa remain

pretty dark. In another corner is a screen that shows a sample of what things people

are searching for at that moment, all over the world. When I was there in 2001, I

asked my hosts what had been the most frequent searches lately. One, of course, was

"sex," a perennial favorite of Googlers.

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Another was "God." Lots of people searching for Him or Her. A third was "jobs"-you

can't find enough of those. And the fourth most searched item around the time of my

visit? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry: "professional wrestling." The weirdest

one, though, is the Google recipe book, where people just open their refrigerators,

see what ingredients are inside, type three of them into Google, and see what recipes

come up!

Fortunately, no single word or subject accounts for more than 1 or 2 percent of all

Google searches at any given time, so no one should get too worried about the fate

of humanity on the basis of Google's top search items on any particular day. Indeed,

it is the remarkable diversity of searches going on via Google, in so many different

tongues, that makes the Google search engine (and search engines in general) such

huge flatteners. Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on

their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about

so many other people.

Said Google cofounder Russian-born Sergey Brin, "If someone has broadband, dial-up,

or access to an Internet cafe, whether a kid in Cambodia, the university professor,

or me who runs this search engine, all have the same basic access to overall research

information that anyone has. It is a total equalizer. This is very different than

how I grew up. My best access was some library, and it did not have all that much

stuff, and you either had to hope for a miracle or search for something very simple

or something very recent." When Google came along, he added, suddenly that kid had

"universal access" to the information in libraries all over the world.

That is certainly Google's goal-to make easily available all the world's knowledge

in every language. And Google hopes that in time, with a PalmPilot or a cell phone,

everyone everywhere will be able to carry around access to all the world's knowledge

in their pockets. "Everything" and "everyone" are key words that you hear around

Google all the time. Indeed, the official Google history carried on its home page

notes that the name "Google" is a play on the word "'googol,' which is the number

represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects

the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of

information available on the

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Web," just for you. What Google's success reflects is how much people are interested

in having just that-all the world's knowledge at their fingertips. There is no bigger

flattener than the idea of making all the world's knowledge, or even just a big chunk

of it, available to anyone and everyone, anytime, anywhere.

"We do discriminate only to the degree that if you can't use a computer or don't have

access to one, you can't use Google, but other than that, if you can type, you can

use Google," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. And surely if the flattening of the world

means anything, he added, it means that "there is no discrimination in accessing

knowledge. Google is now searchable in one hundred languages, and every time we find

another we increase it. Let's imagine a group with a Google iPod one day and you can

tell it to search by voice-that would take care of people who can't use a computer-and

then [Google access] just becomes about the rate at which we can get cheap devices

into people's hands."

How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it "in-forming."

In-forming is the individual's personal analog to open-sourcing, outsourcing,

insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring. Informing is the ability to build and

deploy your own personal supply chain-a supply chain of information, knowledge, and

entertainment. In-forming is about self-collaboration-becoming your own

self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment,

without having togo to the library or the movie theater or through network television.

In-forming is searching for knowledge. It is about seeking like-minded people and

communities. Google's phenomenal global popularity, which has spurred Yahoo! and

Microsoft (through its new MSN Search) also to make power searching and in-forming

prominent features of their Web sites, shows how hungry people are for this form of

collaboration. Google is now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from

150 million just three years ago.

The easier and more accurate searching becomes, added Larry Page, Google's other

cofounder, the more global Google's user base becomes, and the more powerful a

flattener it becomes. Every day more and more people are able to in-form themselves

in their own language. Today, said

Page, "only a third of our searches are U.S.-based, and less than half are in English."

Moreover, he added, "as people are searching for more obscure things, people are

publishing more obscure things," which drives the flattening effect of in-forming

even more. All the major search engines have also recently added the capability for

users to search not only the Web for information but also their own computer's hard

drive for words or data or e-mail they know is in there somewhere but have forgotten

where. When you can search your own memory more efficiently, that is really in-forming.

In late2004, Google announced plans toscan the entire contents of both the University

of Michigan and Stanford University Libraries, making tens of thousands of books

available and searchable online.

In the earliest days of search engines, people were amazed and delighted to stumble

across the information they sought; eureka moments were unexpected surprises, said

Yahool's cofounder Jerry Yang. "Today their attitudes are much more presumptive. They

presume that the information they're looking for is certainly available and that it's

just a matter of technologists making it easier to get to, and in fewer keystrokes,"

he said. "The democratization of information is having a profound impact on society.

Today's consumers are much more efficient-they can find information, products,

services, faster [through search engines] than through traditional means. They are

better informed about issues related to work, health, leisure, etc. Small towns are

no longer disadvantaged relative to those with better access to information. And

people have the ability to bebetter connected to things that interest them, toquickly

and easily become experts in given subjects and to connect with others who share their

interests."

Google's founders understood that by the late 1990s hundreds of thousands of Web pages

were being added to the Internet each day, and that existing search engines, which

tended to search for keywords, could not keep pace. Brin and Page, who met as Stanford

University graduate students in computer science in 1995, developed a mathematical

formula that ranked a Web page by how many other Web pages were linked to it, on the

assumption that the more people linked to a certain page, the more important the page.

The key breakthrough that enabled

Google to become first among search engines was its ability to combine its PageRank

technology with an analysis of page content, which determines which pages are most

relevant tothe specific search being conducted. Even though Google entered the market

after other major search players, its answers were seen by people as more accurate

and relevant to what they were looking for. The fact that one search engine was just

a little better than the others led a tidal wave of people to switch to it. (Google

now employs scores of mathematicians working on its search algorithms, in an effort

to always keep them one step more relevant than the competition.)

For some reason, said Brin, "people underestimated the importance of finding

information, as opposed to other things you would do online. If you are searching

for something like a health issue, you really want to know; in some cases it is a

life-and-death matter. We have people who search Google for heart-attack symptoms

and then call nine-one-one." But sometimes you really want to in-form yourself about

something much simpler.

When I was in Beijing in June 2004, I was riding the elevator down one morning with

my wife, Ann, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Natalie, who was carrying a fistful of

postcards written to her friends. Ann said to her, "Did you bring their addresses

along?" Natalie looked at her as if she were positively nineteenth-century. "No,"

she said, with that you-are-so-out-of-it-Mom tone of voice. "I just Googled their

phone numbers, and their home addresses came up."

Address book? You dummy, Mom.

All that Natalie was doing was in-forming, using Google in a way that I had no idea

was even possible. Meanwhile, though, she also had her iPod with her, which empowered

her to in-form herself in another way- with entertainment instead of knowledge. She

had become her own music editor and downloaded all her favorite songs into her iPod

and was carrying them all over China. Think about it: For decades the broadcast

industry was built around the idea that you shoot out ads on network television or

radio and hope that someone is watching or listening. But thanks to the flattening

technologies in entertainment, that world is quickly fading away. Now with TiVo you

can become your own TV edi156

tor. TiVo allows viewers to digitally record their favorite programs and skip the

ads, except those they want to see. You watch what you want when you want. You don't

have to make an appointment with a TV channel at the time and place someone else sets

and watch the commercials foisted on you. With TiVo you can watch only your own shows

and the commercials you want for only those products in which you might be interested.

But just as Google can track what you are searching for, so too can TiVo, which knows

which shows and which ads you are freezing, storing, and rewinding on your own TV.

So here's a news quiz: Guess what was the most rewound moment in TV history? Answer:

Janet's Jackson breast exposure, or, as it was euphemistically called, her "wardrobe

malfunction," at the 2004 Super Bowl. Just ask TiVo. In a press release it issued

on February 2,2004, TiVo said, "Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson stole the show

during Sunday's Super Bowl, attracting almost twice as many viewers as the most

thrilling moments on the field, according to an annual measurement of

second-by-second viewership in TiVo households. The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew

the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership

spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo's unique

capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and

again."

So if everyone can increasingly watch what he wants however many times he wants when

he wants, the whole notion of broadcast TV-which is that we throw shows out there

one time, along with their commercials, and then try to survey who is watching-will

increasingly make less and less sense. The companies you want to bet on are those

that, like Google or Yahoo! or TiVo, learn to collaborate with their users and offer

them shows and advertisements tailored just for them. I can imagine a day soon when

advertisers won't pay for anything other than that.

Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and TiVo have learned to thrive not by

pushing products and services on their customers as much as by building collaborative