Arizona, California, Utah, Virginia, and Michigan are already participating in Google's consulting venture. Google hopes to get local governments involved in the effort.
Why is Google venturing into state government to do consulting and do it for free?
The very first reason is to give the state's data files readability by most search engines. Lots of government information is made public, however, data files haven't been indexed by the search engines at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
Google is looking into other avenues for income in light of the changing economic environment. It's going for very large business because their expertise is in searching through large banks of data. They are looking for a way to get their foot in the door as well as provide a service that will benefit both parties. They start with government systems and improve files’ readability and more data stored is suddenly available to an end user when searching through the Internet. (All security will remain in place so private information remains private.)
Google's intention is to be able to pull in local governments after tackling the states. Wow, that's not a bad market to be in today.
What kind of consulting work will they be providing?
Google has the best search system available. It is very fast in comparison to the other data retrieval software. If Google can handle retrievals and searches for the entire world, every day, then they have a great product to market in any industry. They will be indexing data files and gearing up the data to be readable by their search engine. In the past, software was written to store files differently from one product to another. Indexing data in files to be read by most search engines is their expertise. Data Management Consulting and creating faster search engines is also their expertise.
What kind of software will they be providing?
Google is the leader in search engines. They are now offering a browser to use online with their latest capabilities for searching through data that puts Google light years ahead of other search engines by comparison. How do they do this? I would like to know, too. Google is providing a service to give the data files better recognition when using Internet search capabilities. That's the way they are improving searches and getting better speed and results for state offices. Their software can pick up data files from different programs, if the data is stored and indexed to be compatible to the eyes of the search engine.
Better indexing so Internet search engines can read means a lot for you too. Efficiency resulting from faster search capabilities that picks up all data selected in the search criteria and available in State data files can provide more information about you. Don't worry, only information that is available to the public will be retrievable. What has been secured before will still be secured no matter what changes are made to the data files. A state's search engine is probably child's play for Google, but the job of making the data readable is not. No doubt, they have an incredible team of software writers, consultants and computer whizzes that can go into data files and index them. It's a big job.
Why are they doing it for free?
Because they can and they want to establish that by tackling a very difficult project to prove their capabilities to index huge data files successfully and make data in the files available through the Internet's search engine. Google is trying to break into the consulting market to provide another stream of income to increase sales and marketing of their products combined with their expertise. Google describes their latest technology in search engines as driving an old Model T car down the highway racing against the newest, greatest, and latest model that Porsche delivers. Can you picture that race in your mind? It's an incredible advertisement for Google and the service they offer. (Of course Google is the Porsche in that metaphor.) They came up with a great marketing plan. Watch for their outcome in the news.
About Google as an Industry Leader
There is a lot of competition out there. In the early days of the Internet, you could count the top search companies with a hand or two. Now, there are a lot of up and coming search engine providers. To survive and dominate, their goal is like any other business: to remain at the top. When you are an industry leader in any market, you look for ways to increase your share of the pie. Google has gross revenues over just about 1.5 billion. 30% of that is profit. Looking at their Income Statement, you can see this is a well run company. They know their business and they are running it as well as they write their software to run.
In the future, the efforts of Google and the state and local governments will be recorded as history making in the growth of the Internet. It will take a lot of hours and work to update data files to be readable by a Google search engine. Once that is accomplished, we are one-step closer to being more "compatible" as a nation. Well, at least in the software retrieval arena. We are closer to a central data gathering system led by Google.
What's in store for Google and similar search engine companies in the future? If they are focused only on "search engine" incomes, they may have a challenging struggle. How will they survive and what new technologies lie ahead in the future? Is there lots of consulting in Google's future? I'll bet my money on Google but I can't see life without Yahoo.
