The Googlization of Everything

The Common Datatrust Foundation is an interesting new project devoted to the following:

Raise awareness of the privacy challenges
we face today.

Broker the exchange of data between individuals,
institutions, businesses, and government.

Advance new solutions for securely storing
and sharing personal information.

The foundation has an interesting blog, called My Place in the Crowd :

But given that we can't read the minds of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, perhaps what we should be looking at is the conflict-of-interest inherent in Google's business model. Google's stated mission as a company is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. But are Google's customers really the individuals searching for information, or are they the advertisers who actually increase Google's revenues and stock value? To be fair, Google makes a respectable effort to separate advertising from "legitimate," as in "non-jerry-rigged" search results. But after ten years, the Google search experience is pretty much the same as it's always been. Has Google been working really hard on tools to help people find better information faster, or has it been working really hard on tools to help advertisers better target potential customers?