Pandia continues its review of the trouble Google is facing policy and market wise.

This is part two of a two part story. Read part one here.

The market place

A couple of years ago Google’s (GOOG) plan of indexing all content everywhere and “everywhen” suddenly seemed realistic. Not only did it do a good job of indexing the open web, it had also started to index the hidden web (information hidden behind login-protected search forms) and above all, its plan to scan all printed material ever published was off to a good start.

Google’s ambitious translation project, where the goal is to translate web pages in a large number of languages into the preferred language of the user and include them in search results is becoming more and more realistic. This will allow Americans to surf Japanese web sites and visa versa. The English speaking searches can already translate such web pages using Google Translate. The idea now is to include relevant non-Enlgish language web pages in the English language search results. This will add a lot of useful data to the Google search indexes.

Google will probably succeed in translating the Web. And even if conservative stone-age publishers do their best to stop Google for making the world of print searchable, they will probably change the way we research books and magazines as well.

The enemy: Facebook and Apple

The idea of turning Google into the universal entry point for all types of data mining has been foiled, however, and the two culprits are Facebook and Apple.

The users of Facebook now generate a tremendous amount of material that is inaccessible to Google. Google may index some of the Facebook material, but those that have selected strict privacy settings are exempted.

Facebook users also tend to use their circles of friends at Facebook as an alternative to Google when searching for information. They ask their trusted friends about where to find a good restaurant, not Google, which means less advertising revenue for the search giant.

Apple’s walled garaden

Apple has managed to do the unthinkable. They have reintroduced the old paradigm of computing (software/apps with different user interfaces and with a non-Web interface to the Internet) and of publishing (separate non-indexable publications outside the Web) and made us all believe this is a revolutionary new way of presenting information. The fact is that Apple is reintroducing the “walled gardens” of print publishing.

Still, the iPad and the iPhone work. They are excellent tools for accessing online information, but since this information is outside the World Wide Web, Google will have a hard time indexing it.

At the moment there are no good ways of searching the content published in newspapers, books and video for the iPad, mostly because the publishers prefer this old-fashioned way of selling content. They no longer have to give it away for free (only a very few newspapers have had success with walled-in Web content available only to subscribers. This means that they are moving content away from the free web sites into their new paid phone and tablet apps.

(Actually, when writing this post I am quoting from the iPad version of the Economist and the Kindle version of the International Herald Tribune, which makes it harder for me to include clickable and indexable links to the relevant content. This makes it harder for Google to find and index it as well).

The success of small step innovation

Still, there is hope for Google yet. The company may not be the radical innovator it used to be, but it is great at incremental innovation and a company can succeed admirably by continuous improvement of existing products and services.

The core of its search technology remains the old Page Rank formula, but they are continuously improving it to meet the user’s needs. They are also making a lot of small changes to the user interface that improve usability.

For every failure, there is a success story.

Google planned to launch a new fast, light weight, operative system for netbook computers called Chrome this year. The idea was to bypass Windows on small computers used for Web surfing mainly.

Now the netbooks are yesterday’s news. The iPad is the new black, and the Chrome OS has still not seen the light of day.

However, Google’s operating system for smartphones, Android, is doing very well, and is as popular as Apple’s IOS.

Apple has a closed proprietary system used only on its own phones and tablets. Google has given the other phone and tablet makers the software they need to compete with Apple — Android — for free, and they are embracing it wholeheartedly. When it comes to delivering apps and mobile ads, Google can definitely compete with Apple.

Social networking

The Economist points out that Google is no one-trick pony:

“Looking ahead, Google executives depict a world in which the firm not only helps people to find information they are looking for, but delivers information to them before they know they need it.”

The idea is to make use of personal data the user has given them permission to use (in particular search and surfing data). The Economist uses alerting the user of a new book of his or her favorite author as an example.

Even if Google has not managed to match Facebook on social networking, it may make use of its ubiquitous Gmail account system to add a social dimension to its various services. YouTube may, for instance, show you what the favorite videos of your Google friends are.

Google did a lot of damage to this potential by launching Google Buzz without asking Gmail users for permission to include people in their address book as public “friends”, but there may still be hope for that concept.

And if Google fails in beating Facebook in the social networking game, the company can always make use of Facebook to prove that they are not the monopolists people believe them to be. The International Herald Tribune reports that the company is using this argument vis-a-vis the European Commission:

“The company says its high share of searches does not equate to a position of dominance on the Internet partly because of the rise of companies like Facebook and Twitter, which, like a search engine,also serve as a source of links to other web sites.”

This is part two of a two part story. Read part one here.