The possibilities are, well, possibly limitless. Google has become the ubiquitous purveyor of information on the World Wide Web, and its all-encompassing eye is also trained on the entire surface of the Earth, the oceans and Mars.
Now, even Vermont is becoming a Google player, thanks to Windsor County resident and erstwhile politician Matt Dunne, who serves as Google’s head of community affairs.
At a recent presentation to nonprofits at CCTV’s Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, Dunne described how Google could help small Vermont groups raise money and increase efficiency through the use of the company’s external philanthropic programs. This included Google Grants, which funnels advertising dollars into nonprofit coffers, and its free application services for nonprofits, including a PayPal style checkout system.
At that Oct. 15 event, broadcast on Channel 17 as part of the Center for Media and Democracy’s “Media Maven” series for nonprofits, Dunne described how all things Google — Google voice, iGoogle, Google sites – could help Vermont nonprofits better manage internal documents and advertise their services.
Google’s contribution to the so-called gift economy is almost as large as its global reach. Dunne, a self-described Google evangelist, says the company served 1.6 billion users and made $20 billion in advertising revenue last year.
The company’s foundation, Google.org, is also working on internal charitable programs that look like high-tech takes on Nobel Prize-winning projects.
The foundation has set its sights on solving the world’s most intractable problems – climate change, global disease outbreaks, war and poverty — through technology.
For instance, teams of Google.org geeks are working on the development of a cheap renewable source of electricity, the mass production of rechargeable plug-in electric vehicles, and a free PowerMeter system that would enable electricity consumers who have access to smart grid technology to gauge their power usage in real time, according to the organization’s Web site. The objective is simple: To ameliorate the effects of climate change.
Want to know more about global flu activity right this second? Google.org tracks outbreaks on a world map and claims on its Web site that Google Flu Trends can estimate “flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.” (In case you’re wondering, Vermont’s flu activity is “intense” right now, according to the site.)
“Google searches for a flu of some kind is actually the fastest predictor of flus the Centers for Disease Control has,” Dunne says. “The platform is big enough that we can measure the key words people put in against what should be the norm. Seeing a spike there is a very immediate indication that flu is coming into the area.”
Google.org has also launched a new initiative “to use information to empower citizens and communities, providers, and policymakers to improve the delivery of essential public services such as education, health, water and sanitation” worldwide.
“We believe microenterprise in the Third World is the best way to support democracies and to build a middle class,” Dunne says.
Also recently, an employee helped the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum create a graphic depiction of the conflict in Sudan using Google Earth.
The company allows its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time working on “anything they want as long as it’s part of making information universally accessible and useful,” Dunne says.
Just how big is Google? Bigger than anyone except perhaps the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, can imagine.
The company employs nearly 20,000 people, and estimates of the total number of servers the corporation maintains range between 450,000 and 1 million. The servers are housed in “farms” located all over the world. Its headquarters, dubbed the Googleplex, is located in Mountainview, Calif.
Google handled $444 billion in transactions in 2008, Dunne says.
Each day, Google processes 2 billion searches, sends two e-mails per second through its Gmail account system, and uploads 22 hours of video onto You Tube, per minute. It would take a lifetime to watch the video posted on the site every three months, Dunne says.
