Google superpowers

A few years ago, at the height of the millennial Internet euphoria, I was discussing plans for stock option-induced lifestyle changes over beers with a colleague.  “I don’t want to retire personally”, he thoughtfully intoned, “but it would be nice if my wife could finally stop working for good.”  We both blinked at each other for a second, raised our little fingers to the corner of our mouths and – with comic timing built up by an abundance of movies and a dearth of maturity – said, “…and start working for Evil. Muhahahaha.”  This was post-Austin Powers and pre-Al Qaeda, so the word, “evil” was fair game for humor but had not yet entered serious political discourse.  Good times. You had to be there, I guess.

Naturally, this got me thinking about what kinds of interesting, supernatural evil-villain powers could be brought to life using the Internet.  You see, the dotcom boom was never going to end and eventually we’d need a new business plan to, um, capture sticky eyeballs for e-business.  Or something.  I’ve always thought that a keen super-villain power would be omniscience.  Of course, knowing what everybody was thinking all the time would present data storage and user interface problems, but what if you could always know whenever someone was thinking about you?  What if you could have a Sauron-like ability to bend your mind towards anyone speaking your name?  It’d be a boon for junior high school girls and  CEOs alike.  Talk about demographics! 

How would you make money on this, you ask?  Which part of “dotcom” don’t you understand?

Some things are better left forgotten, and this nugget disappeared with the last beer.  Now, four years later, it can come back - and the company that’ll bring it to you is Google. (Notice to AT&T lawyers: fair use of old advertising trademark for satirical purposes.)  Without further ado:

Achieving a first order approximation of omniscience using only Google and parts you can buy at Radio Shack:

1. Purchase a Google AdWords keyword for your name.  AdWords are those little text ad boxes that appear on the right hand side of Google search results and elsewhere.  It doesn’t really matter what your ad says.  Try, “I know you just searched for me.  I am watching”, if you want be ominous.  Feel free to link it to this post so if anyone actually clicks on it, they’ll know what’s up.

2. Whenever someone does a search, Google chooses which ads to display next to the search results from the pool of all ads which have been purchased for the relevant keywords.  This means that unless many other people have bought your name as a keyword, your ad will pop up every single time someone googles your name.  Like this.  This won’t cost you anything unless someone clicks on the ad – in which case it’ll only cost you a few cents.

3. The AdWords management console will show you the number of impressions and the number of clicks for each ad.  Since the number of impressions should closely track the number of searches (except for very popular, oversubscribed names), you’ll know whenever someone googles your name.  Search for yourself a few times and click through to get the system primed.

4. Take your earmuffs (if you live in Boston) or iPod headphones (if you live anywhere else), and add an electrical heating element and wireless data receiver.  Write a program to periodically check your AdWords reports and, every time a new impression comes in, send a ping to your headset.  If you can’t write this program yourself, pay me to subcontract it out for you.

5. Since googling is more or less the same as thinking nowadays, every time somebody "thinks" of you, your ears will burn.

Google can cut out this whole AdWords steps and just offer the whole thing as a paid service: Iamsauron.google.com.  Clearly, this is the promise of the Internet.  Fulfilled.

Of course, Google can just as easily change their terms of service or ad selection algorithm and break this whole idea.  When you’re an omniscient and supernatural dotcom survivor, that kind of power comes with the territory.

[see this update]