Google Ad Sense: the Flip Side

To be or not to be, is no longer the question. It is about how you behave while you 'be'. Every few years, there is a drastic shift from the way we live, think and do business. Google is exactly such a contemporary trailblazer. Whether it was their rather Spartan search engine in 1998, or its advertising programmes or the latest Gmail service, Google has pioneered concepts in the way Internet lives. Each time it did something, it has drawn flak from commentators and Doom-sayers. Today, the debate is about how its mail service inserts advertising into the site's Web pages.



Free and paid services abound. Hotmail blazed the path early with its outrageous offerings and was closely followed by Yahoo, Sify, Rediffmail, etc. All of these services regularly scan our e-mail for spam and viruses. It is unheard of in modern times to have an e-mail service without a plugged in and aggressive spam and virus scanner. Then why is there such a hullabaloo when Gmail has decided to place ads on its e-mail pages? And to the extent that atleast one US statesman is considering a bill to ban Gmail. After all, ads do appear on many other e-mail services. 

What Google says



According to Google, there are no humans involved in the process to read e-mail to decide and place ads at any position. There is a database of keywords and a database of advertisers for those keywords. When we login to check our e-mail, a server-side script reads the content on the page, eliminates all the Gmail standard page-parts (links to inbox, compose pages, various buttons and so on) and passes it on to the regular Google advertising engine. This engine looks up the keywords database and finds relevant advertising. Another script puts it all together and shows it to us on screen. Big deal-this is what happens anyway when we visit any Web page with context advertising on them.

The paranoia



Google is not the only company that could construct a program to mine stored e-mail for confidential information. The very act of sending and receiving e-mail depends on a large number of programs (DNS servers, mail servers, relay points). Yet, we do not see people demanding these be banned.

Another face of this argument is the commercial aspect. Consider this argument-when you receive a mailer from one company, you don't see ad of its competitors on that mailer. This is what Google's advertising effectively does. Let's say you sign up with PCQuest for a newsletter. When you get the newsletter in your Gmail box, you find that Gmail has inserted advertising for other magazines such as Chip and Digit. Advocates of free speech may argue that this would provide open and fair competition. True. But in that case, shouldn't the postal services also instruct us to leave a page blank on our letters for them to insert ads? 

The corporate angle



Gmail in its present form would definitely not find favor with the corporate customers, simply because of the above-mentioned issue. Corporate communiques to your customers would be laced with advertising from competitors drawing business away from you. On the other hand, Gmail, in atleast its existing form, was never meant for such use or corporates could somehow ban their users from using the Gmail Web pages, restricting client-based e-mailing. 

Sign-up restrictions



Several existing sign-up forms already reject free mailbox addresses from being entered in their 'e-mail address' fields. Would Gmail soon find its way into such blacklists? Commentators pro-phecy-it will. 

Beyond privacy issues



The amount of personal data collected by agencies and marketers belittles what might be gleaned just from e-mail (read 'Gmail'). Real-time monitoring is here already. You could be shopping in a mall in the US, have your card maxed out and prompt a call back home asking if your card was stolen-because they wonder why anyone would max out a card shopping for books somewhere on the other side of the globe. Privacy is a slippery slope and we're already more than halfway down that slope. There are other issues to worry about, from RFID tagging to surveillance cameras on street corners. Programmed scanning of e-mail for targeted ad insertion is not a big deal. Moreover, the advertising appears only on the Gmail pages, and doesn't get inserted in to outgoing mail as in Hotmail, Rediffmail and Yahoo. Check at the bottom of any e-mail you received from someone with an account with these services. Ads don't appear when you check your e-mail from a mail client. So, if you're scared of advertising, just download your mail from your favorite mail client. Again, that

option is not a luxury for Hotmail/Yahoo/Rediffmail accounts.

The bigger picture



Social networking services such as Friendster, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Del.irio.us, Del.icio.us and Google's own Orkut have long offered six-degrees of separation. A Gen-II search paradigm if you will. Why should we have to spam all our friends, asking them to 'join my network', if our e-mail clients are smart enough to know who we know, how often we communicate with them, as well as who they know, and how well? Microsoft Research had a project called Wallop going that effectively knew social-networks using e-mail systems. Another service called Chandler

(www.osafoundation.org) was aiming to reinvent the address book for the Internet's purposes including information management, collaboration, high-volume transactions and an extensibility-friendly framework. However, both projects have now faded out of the limelight while they still exist. How exactly is Google/ Gmail related to social networking? Someday, we might be able to query on Gmail and find our friends' friends and make them our friends too. They wouldn't be doing anything new but what Google implements best-Search.

Beyond face value



Today, Google has gone beyond just search to redefine computing. It has revolutionized the way we think about data, its attributes and about storage. Pundits now call Google as the 'Internet Operating System'. 

Google is built on a hundred thousand computers-to us, it appears as one seamless whole, performing its tasks in seconds regardless of where and how it is pulling its data from. Like Clark Shirky (a consultant to the likes of Nokia, GBN, BBC, EFF and the Library of Congress and a prolific Internet commentator) says, "Thomas J Watson (the co-founder of IBM) over-estimated the need for computers in the world by four, Google is 'one computer' enough.” He says that Google has obviated the need to see the PC as the center of the universe. It has recognized that it is the running applications that matter, not its network. 

Once these apps get big enough, the network can truly disappear into the universal virtual computer, with the Internet as the operating system.

Sujay V Sarma