What is Google anyway?

Google has been doing a lot with its ad schemes, focusing on ever more intricate ways of marketing. It's capable of casting its net for a large harvest or a concentrated one. Still, the Internet represents only a small harvest in comparison to that which lies in the great ad ocean of television. Google is now beginning to penetrate that market though, according to an interview with Keval Desai, the program manager for Google's TV ad efforts. With Google making the jump off the Internet and into our TVs they are no longer conforming to "search engine" box they started in. Google is most assuredly an ad-based company, but why then the side projects and technologies? What is Google really?

Amidst accusations that Google is threatening to cut back benefits (laughably just dinner, and only for some employees it seems) and other grimmer portents that Google is calcifying, the correlation can be drawn with Google becoming your typical sort of company. The inevitable downward slide is almost representative of people's expectations, but the only real way to measure such an angle is in comparison to what Google gives back. In the traditional model, this might be charity donations, but Google is working on other projects, like putting 10 million dollars into thermal energy, that could be seen as directly philanthropic.

Beyond what Google does as a company, and what sort of company it is, the thing that must be kept in mind is how Google got to where it is. Its search engine was very useful in a world of search engine hopping to get the best results. Even now it seems to maintain robustness, and not even the big impact of Cuil seems to have done much to damage it. In the background though smaller search engines, like Clusty, work to develop better results and if they ever achieve traction they too could have a meteoric rise to challenge Google. If Google declines what will it become next, as it assuredly will not die so easily?