Commentary

The Gift of Google: 48 Hours To Kill

The Wednesday launch of Google Instant unleashed a torrent of second-guessing on Thursday on the impact of having your search query results evolve as you type and change in real-time rather than waiting till you hit "enter." Are the results based on cookies? on where you live? your search history? will they trump the ability to affordably buy keywords? Will more advertisers focus on these keywords, which means that CPCs will go up creating more revenue for Google, but making it harder for SEM companies to work profitably? Is all this Google's prelude to morphing its biz model from desktops to mobile? Who in the hell knows?

Google calculated that the new tool would cumulatively save people more than 3.5 billion seconds every day (something that will probably yield enormous savings for them in computing time and resources -- presumably so they can stay focused on doing no evil). NBC said that for consumers, the time saved would accumulate to a couple of additional days tacked on to the end of your life. That got my attention. First, because we have come to the point where Google is such a pervasive tool in our work and play lives that we spend more time with it than, say, that brother-in-law we don't really like anyway. And second, because I am not sure I want to wait for two days to be tacked on my life when I am bedridden, crippled by some disease and having to watch my kids figure out how to kill time in a hospice room while waiting for me to kick the bucket so they can get back to their normal lives.

What if I could have the two days now? Since they are bonus days, I should be able to do whatever I want, right? No rules, no restrictions. Let's see.... I could burn a Koran today and steal all the press thunder from that moronic "man of god" in Florida. I could buy Terry Kawaja a quart of bourbon and ask him to walk me through every part of "The Chart" explaining in exquisite detail how each company works in relationship to the next, but since "The Chart" by nature has to be organic, it might well take longer than two days and Terry would be bored and start humming potential theme songs for his next humorous video on why derivatives are incapable of having a value of their own as stand-alone assets.

I could buy myself a quart of bourbon and figure out once and for all if advertising is art or science.

If I really want to test human endurance, I could ask every advertising technology company to come and give me their PowerPoint pitch on how they can produce a higher conversion rate than the guy who just left. Or better yet, lock them all in a vault for 20 minutes armed with baseball bats and calculators and only let the last guy standing give his pitch. CEOs only -- no subbing in that summer intern who should be on his way back to campus to play inside linebacker for Florida State. I might invite Michael Vick to come over to help me take bets on who will emerge.

I could offer to trade my collection of photos of naked models and actresses for the collections everyone else has on their hard drives, but with only a couple of terabytes of external storage on my desktop, I'd run out of room in under an hour. Yes, I have those kinds of friends.

Contrarily, I could spend two days doing something to make the world a better place (dumping my photo collection?) like volunteering in a homeless shelter or soup kitchen or rebuilding houses damaged by natural disasters, tutoring, mentoring or simply helping clean up a vacant lot in a poor neighborhood.

Or, I could do what you want. Use the comments box. Make suggestions. Think Big Picture. I promise to take the best suggestions and utterly ignore them. After all, they are my days, not yours.

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