SIVA Vaidhyanathan in his book, The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) published by University of California Press in 2011, coined the phrase: “googlisation”. This is not surprising, since recent editions of dictionaries have included the word “google” as a verb, more specifically a colloquialism initially meaning “to search for with the Google search engine” but now in common use to refer to an Internet search.

Google Inc is a US multinational corporation which began as an Internet search engine but has diversified into e-mail, cloud computing and myriad related products. The company’s growth has been fuelled by internally created innovations, acquisitions eg YouTube and strategic business partnerships.

The founding and growth of Google is insightfully chronicled in Randall Stross, Planet Google. One Company’s Plan to Organise Everything We Know (New York: Free Press, 2008).

The most striking attribute of this company and the key to its success and market dominance is continuous innovation, not in response to competition, but to stay ahead of competitors. The lesson for all companies in the throes of intense global competition is not only to respond to new demands from consumers and constantly improve existing services, but most important to create demand by inventing entirely new services and products that create their own demand.

Stross’s book is replete with the creativity and innovation of the Google Inc which is the differentia specifica of great companies and the hallmark of genuine entrepreneurship. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have lost none of the creative zeal which led them to form the company in 1997, while pursuing their PhD at Stanford University.

Planet Google is a “corporate thriller” which keeps the reader’s attention. It covers subject matters which require some specialised knowledge, but the reader can cover these without a complete mastery of the technical details and terminology. Professor Stross traces the corporate evolution including the company’s Darwinian approach surviving competition. The lesson is no corporation, regardless of size and market dominance, can afford to be complacent about aggressive new or smaller competitors as Microsoft learnt the hard way.

He does not hesitate to present aspects of business conduct about which moral and ethical issues have been raised. The most ambitious plan for the digitisation of 30 million books (fascinatingly related in Chapter 4) was proposed by Google as a logical expression of the motto and mission statement of Google: “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Google’s proposal all but ignited a firestorm over intellectual property rights and the privatisation of knowledge. Vaidhyanathan is so concerned about what he describes as the “googlisation of knowledge” that, inspired by the Human Genome Project, he suggests a “Human Knowledge Project” (see pages 203-210) which would be a democratically governed and publicly operated global information ecosystem.

This would eliminate the possibility of the control, distortion and manipulation of information, which is an eschatology of a dystopia popularised in some science fiction literature.

Vaidhyanathan worries that Google’s goals and dominance make its conduct harmful in two respects. First, Google’s dominance makes its use an integral part of culture and daily life. “Google is becoming indistinguishable for the Web itself.” But using Google is not innocuous for the danger lies in its very iniquitousness, because as we use it, it affects what information we get and how that information is used.

“Increasingly, Google is the lens through which we view the world. Google refracts, more than reflects.” Second, Google uses those that use its services because while providing information it is also gathering and purveying “gigabytes of personal information” to advertisers and maybe the covert intelligence services of government. His concerns are not assuaged by the company’s informal motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Is googlisation to information what globalisation is to economics? Googlisation and globalisation have many aspects in common, eg the privatisation of activities traditionally in the public domain, concentration of market power, the extent to which a few corporations exert enormous influence over whole aspects of mankind’s existence, to cite a few of the myriad issues.

The two complex processes are proceeding rapidly with considerable synergy, eg googlisation is the globalisation of Google and googlisation makes for the seamless world market which is integral to globalisation.

We all need to be better informed on both googlisation and globalisation, and these two books are highly recommended. They are informative and insightful, providing much to be learnt and even more to cogitate on.