What Google Knows About You

Google may know more about you than your mother does. Got a problem with that? Google famously describes itself as on a mission “to organize all the world’s information.” That sounds impressive, but carries its share of problems. How then does Google choose its priorities, and how does it plan for the long term? It is decent question to put to any big company in these times of unprecedented technological change. It’s particularly apt at Google, though — with almost all of the company’s products based on large software projects in enormous data centers that consumers reach over the Internet, it can see and judge consumer interactions with its products in near real time. That means it can judge the success of a new feature within a couple of weeks of release, and that “long term” planning is often a year or less, with a lot of adjustments along the way.