What does Google do? More than search, it positions

We all know Google does search, but what about the 24 subsidiaries it owns? Many of them aim to support the process of bringing more of your communication within the ambit of Google's search-based advertising business, so ads can be placed in more and more intimate parts of your online experience.

Thomas Schmitz, president of SEOcritique.com, has put together a quiz to help you test your Google knowledge. What you'll see is: Google has purchased companies that help to capture data about specific The whole game is up in the air and if Google wants to preserve its advantage, it will have to rethink its margins.aspects of the market and you.

I was on vacation until yesterday, so I didn't get to post about the $1 billion Viacom lawsuit against Google/YouTube. Suffice to say, it confirms my prediction that Google's costs are going to rise.

But the battle is not over copyright or innovation, as Fred Wilson argues, it is over the revenue created by content. The creators of content, which include you and I, because we share so much of our personal data with Google, are going to come out of this transition on the winning end, since the market will decide who ends up with the fair shares of the revenue. 

Google's future, as I laid out before taking off, can be vast though not built on such high margins, but it isn't going to happen without a lot more sharing of revenue. Ultimately, even users are going to need to share in the value created by the content of their lives online. The old-fashioned content creators—studios and publishers that have invested in the infrastructure for production and marketing of content—are just the first to ask for their piece of the action.

The real revolution will take place when Google reaches out to the individual doing the searching and uploading massive amounts of information about their lives to compensate them for all the value they create in the positioning of information for economic advantage.

Google's relationship with all information providers, big and small, are fundamentally economic problems that remain completely unresolved. The whole game is up in the air and if Google wants to preserve its advantage, it will have to rethink its margins and who must be compensated in order to make themselves indispensable to every value creator in its market.