If you use a Google product or service to call someone instead of sending them some GMail, that conversation isn’t relevant to Google, at least not yet.
I can just picture the sales team at Google are sitting around thinking about how knowing their users, via analysis of email/search/etc.., drives their product, and how people using their services via video/audio are escaping that analysis.
And yet, doesn’t Google own the most sophisticated voice analysis system on the planet? Wouldn’t it be really easy to compress audio/video data, upload it to a Google server, and process it for relevance?
Let’s say you kept the NKOTB concert a complete secret because it’s your anniversary gift to your wife, and Google realizes you’re at the concert by the audio in the background of a phone call + your general location? If that means that Google now includes ‘Download NKOTB live at xyz concert’ adverts in your ad stream for a few days following, wouldn’t that be great?
Well those salespeople managed to convince someone at Google it’d be wise to at the very least patent such a method so that in the coming years they aren’t licensing it from their competition. Seems smart right?
Not with all the FUD – (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that is lingering on-line, no sir, this is war with the tin-foil beanie brigade.
Even Google Trends shows us how trust is at an all time low:
trust
First of all, patenting a technology doesn’t guarantee it will happen; How long have we had flying car patents and still nothing feasible?
Secondly, what are the odds Google is going to force nervous users to flee to competing products by snooping on conversations without consent?
And finally, in several key locations around the planet, it’s technically illegal to record someone without their consent. Since a cell phone could pick-up a background conversation, it would be legal suicide to try and implement ‘eavesdropping’ technology without a boatload of safeguards, warnings, and disclaimers.
Nerds are Still Cool However..
We’ll need to talk about this more ‘in depth’ at a later stage in it’s development, but Google’s Knowledge Graph is very exciting.
Have a look at the Knowledge Graph video released yesterday by Google:
I’m sure Bing and competing search engines will just claim Google is evil and trying to keep you on their pages by giving you the answers you need instantly, but if that’s their idea of evil then slap on the horns and poke me with a trident. 
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 10:45 am
