How Google could become Big Brother

It's a scenario that is diametrically opposed to Google's motto of "do no evil" but fears are growing that everyone's favouritesearch engine company is in danger of evolving into a sinister corporate Big Brother.

While executives at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California celebrated a 92 per cent increase in net income yesterday, computer users across the globe were busy downloading an eight-minute fake documentary that illustrates the concerns users have about the rise of Google.

The short video, available on www.robinsloan.com/epic, shows a possible future in which Google merges with Amazon and creates Googlezon, a vast conglomerate that unites an individual's consumer tastes and current interests. As a result it defeats old media such as newspapers and television and provides a personalised news service, but one riddled with errors and conspiracies.

It is just the latest example of concerns about the rise of Google which ten days ago purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. Google, which began as a research project with two PhD students at Stanford University in California, now employs over 9,000 people and has an annual revenue of $6.1 billion.

Yesterday the company announced that during the three months until the end of September, its net income was $733 million (390m), a 92 per cent rise on the same time last year.

Yet Google is attracting critics such as the website GoogleWatch, which argues that as the company stores information on every computer user, it has become a major privacy issue. The website states: "With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S. Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. ."

In January Google agreed to censor itself to satisfy the Chinese government. Its Chinese language site - Google.cn - censors topics such as Taiwanese independence and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Last night Adrian Monk, a media analyst at City University, said that in the future Google will find it increasingly difficult to live up to the company's motto. "'Do no evil' is something Mother Theresa would find it hard to live up to. It's OK to have such high ideals when you are working in a garage, but when you come out on to the street it is a different matter."

Mr Monk believes that as the company has almost $10 billion in funds it will soon go on a spending spree and expand dramatically from its early history as a simple search engine. "It will all change."

Vin Crosbie, an industry analyst who writes for the website Digital Deliverance said last night: "There was a 1960s' movie called Colossus: The Forbin Project about a computer that wants to dominate the Earth and everyone on it. That's Google. "

Name game

THE name Google originally came from a misspelling of the word "googol" - a mathematical term used to describe a one followed by one hundred zeroes.

Fast mover

THE Google company began as a research project in January 1996 and was set up by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in California. In 1997, the domain name google.com was registered, and by September 1998 the company was incorporated as Google Inc. Its popularity has since soared.

Googlers

BY last month, Google had 9,378 full-time employees - known as "Googlers". The company is based at Mountain View in California.

Luxury living

GOOGLE'S HQ is known as "the Googleplex" and offers lavish facilities to its hard-working staff. A piano and lava lamps decorate the lobby and the hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Recreational facilities for staff include pool and ping-pong tables. Snack rooms throughout the complex are stocked with free sweets, nuts, fresh fruit and dozens of different drinks.

Real find

ACCORDING to one estimate, Google is the most used search engine on the internet with a 54 per cent market share, compared to 23 per cent for Yahoo and 13 per cent for MSN. But other estimates have put Google's share as high as 80 per cent.

Billion a day

GOOGLE'S search engine receives about one billion search requests every day. Put another way, every second there are 2,000 internet searches using Google.

Word game

IN MANY languages, Google has become a verb meaning to search, although the company has expressed concerns this might weaken its brand.