Remember in Back to the Future II when Marty McFly got a hold of that Almanac from the future? I feel like Google,  just shy of the factual history that was in that almanac, has the next best thing, something very close: Conscious and sub-conscious behavioral data of the consumer.

Controlling the Present, Generating The Future

They have access to a level of human nature and core behavioral patterns that not many see or think to try and notice. They get to also see that aspect of human nature at a depth that researchers, behavioral scientists, and marketers would sell their first born on eBay for, or at the very least drool heavily over. I’ve always wondered if this search data is protected somewhere similar to Dr. Evil’s volcano lair, masking itself as a search company, all the while it’s collecting and subversively controlling business relationships, retail purchases and trends.

The brilliance in what Google is doing, whether it was intentional or not back when they started ramping up, is that no one at Google had to go out door to door, getting other human beings to volunteer for a “study” for their “marketing purposes.” The Google machine, because of the fact that people have made them a necessity in their lives for acquiring information, has human beings populating their databases voluntarily via billions upon billions of web requests every day. Amazing.

Google has the power to decide what is popular next. People that have access to that data could predict the next trends in B2B, B2C, and C2C (Consumer to Consumer: The current marketing territory where most companies feel like they’re herding cats).

Here are some related articles of interest on this topic:

Gizmodo: Google and the Deadly Power of Data

Channel.Hexus: Google battles Big Brother image

Google As Big Brother