Making sense of Google's seemingly kooky concepts
SAN FRANCISCO — In its self-proclaimed drive to make the world a better place, Google has immersed itself in far more than Internet search and online ads. But driverless cars and a wind energy farm in the Atlantic Ocean?
Context & Ripple Effects
The Google of the mid-decade profiles — the Washington Post's 2005 'Googling Google', then Rough Type's 2007 attempt at 'Understanding Google' — treated the company primarily as a search engine with an advertising machine attached. By October 2010 the frame no longer holds: within days of this piece, Google had demonstrated self-driving Toyota Priuses running real Highway 1 traffic between San Francisco and Los Angeles with roof-mounted sensors, confirmed plans for a wind energy farm in the Atlantic Ocean, and was building a Google Price Index from shopping data that could rival official inflation statistics.
What makes the expansion credible rather than kooky, per the same-week reporting, is that the core business keeps funding it: after Bing-Yahoo integration closed in, Google's share of paid-search spending actually rose more than two percent between Q2 and Q3, while the steady tweaking of its search engine continues and Android pushes into India's huge wireless market. The moonshots are not a distraction from dominance — they sit alongside it.
First-order effects
- Google's ad monopoly over paid search is now explicitly bankrolling bets outside its market — autonomous vehicles, offshore wind, macroeconomic data products — none of which need to pay off soon because search revenue keeps compounding.
- Automakers and sensor suppliers gain an unexpected deep-pocketed entrant: Google's Prius test fleet puts roof-mounted lidar-style hardware onto public highways years before any production program.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals and advertisers face a two-front competitor — Microsoft's Bing-Yahoo alliance was meant to consolidate challenge, yet paid-search spend still shifted toward Google even as it diversifies, raising the cost of competing on both breadth and depth.
- Official statistical agencies and energy utilities acquire a new class of competitor: if a private web-shopping index rivals government inflation measures and a search company builds Atlantic generation capacity, incumbents in both fields lose their assumed monopoly on the data or asset.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural endpoint is a conglomerate whose search-ad cash flow functions as internal venture capital for physical-infrastructure industries — transport, energy, telecoms — reshaping what 'internet company' means for regulators and investors alike.
- A company operating simultaneously in search, cars, power, and price statistics concentrates more economic signal in fewer hands, which is precisely the concentration antitrust scrutiny tends to follow once the businesses stop looking like side projects.
The trend: Google is converting its search-advertising cash machine into optionality across transport, energy, mobile, and data — turning a search company into a diversified infrastructure bet.