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At Google, pressure mounts to find something beyond search (cnet.com).

A market they seemingly monopolised long ago, indeed, even substituting the word “search” for “google” on Millennial tongue of many with its only competitor Microsoft never quite manging yet to Bing it on, perhaps because, search? Oh, google it you mean.

With after-conception step-parent company Alphabet recently formed so investors were not put off by those “Other bets” seeking to change the world as they changed search—or at least exhaustively monetised it—with Project Loon, Google’s effort to beam Internet signals from high-altitude balloons so people in developing nations with lack of sufficient sanitation or drinkable water can receive targeted ads for Calvin Kleins on their net-connected phone too.

Actually though, I’d challenge that “addressing a once-in-a-generation problem” of making it easy to search for stuff as, for sure, they did not invent the concept of search engine, I recall Alta Vista, Excite and a pre-Google favourite of mine Hotbot, all of which made searching content of the WWW sufficient if not as algorithmically sound as “Don’t be evil” made it with an algorithm that in essence search rank crowdfunds popularity rather than content and who have been fighting off scammers abusing said secret algorithm ever since and prompting commercial and at times literal suicide for some who brought and drunk too much of that SEO snake oil which turned toxic when they tweak said secret algorithm (savingsmallbusiness.org, 2012).

And although developing that generation-addressing problem search algorithm them self, much of the inventions after have actually come from companies they have brought out when seen as on the step of being “the next big thing”—Android for example, initially developed by Android, Inc., which Google bought in 2005, Blogger acquired from Pyra Labs in 2003, Picasa acquired from Lifescape in 2004 and essentially dropped when promoting its own Facebook alternative + became the next big thing.

Which can be, to use the social media parlance, quickly “unfriended” if not accumulating enough “likes” to prove their worth. With driverless cars being one of their current “next big things” the “experimentaion” process could be potentially more unfortunate, being perhaps why said parent company was formed to look after “Other bets” as investors are in general troubled by anything other than a safe one: Google driverless car crashes into bus (Pick of the Month 31st Mar. 2016).

Updated 27th April 2016

But while waiting for “Others bets” to change the word or at least pay off, there’s always the same ol’ extra ads marketing shuffle to rely on:

YouTube will soon roll out six-second ads that you can’t skip (theverge.com).

Presumably being sell stuff loosely related to what you are watching, or not.

Another sweetner being that those devices often lack the ad blockers not currently been bought out or persuaded to roll over that cockblock those you can skip on those irksome non-portable pocketed devices.

Updated 1st May 2016

Seemingly not learning from the debacle that was Google Glass, or just keen to give you or it another poke in the eye:

Google patents computer that can be injected directly into the eyeball (independent.co.uk).

All the better to see you with—or targed AdWords at least. Indeed, you can hear a sigh of relief from investers that “technology in the patent may never actually be released” is under the superintendence of Alphabet’s “Other bets”.

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