Google's goal to organise your daily life
Google's ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off. — Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive …
Context & Ripple Effects
Schmidt's remarks extend an arc visible since October 2005, when Google framed its mission as pursuing knowledge on a planetary scale; the FT interview makes explicit that the 'knowledge' now includes the user's own life — jobs taken, leisure chosen. What was previously inferred from product behaviour is now stated strategy by the chief executive.
The same day's confirmed activity shows how broad the data-gathering base already is: venture backing for genetics firm 23andMe, an FCC proposal to allocate radio spectrum through real-time auctions modelled on its ad-selling system, and the Hot Trends launch atop more than six years of Zeitgeist popularity lists — each a pipeline of behavioural or infrastructural data feeding one company.
First-order effects
- Every additional Google service becomes a data-collection surface: advising users on careers and free time requires profiles assembled from search logs, accounts and whatever else the company touches, so product design and information-maximisation become the same decision.
- Google's simultaneous publication of aggregated query data via Hot Trends turns the same search logs into both raw material for personalisation and a public relations asset, normalising the idea that user behaviour is a Google product.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo! and Microsoft face pressure to match the depth of behavioural profiling or accept lower-value advertising inventory, since whoever holds the richest personal data commands the targeting premium in paid search.
- The FCC spectrum proposal signals Google exporting its real-time auction machinery to adjacent markets — if allocation-by-auction works for ads, the same data-and-auction stack is positioned to price other scarce resources.
Third-order effects
- If the advice engine materialises, the business model shifts from selling links to influencing decisions, which will draw regulators and privacy advocates into questioning how much personal data any single company may legitimately hold — a debate the search-log practices have already seeded.
- The confirmed 23andMe investment points to profiling extending beyond behaviour into biology, widening the definition of 'personal information' far past anything a search log contains.
The trend: Search engines are repositioning from answering questions to organising lives, with accumulated behavioural data — not the index itself — becoming the strategic asset.