How might Google monetize Ingress?

The first question I had when I heard about the Ingress beta was: why is Google doing this?

Face it: there's a real dollar cost to anything Google does, so it has to do one of the following:

1. Generate more revenue than it costs
2. Enable other Google products and services to make more revenue than it costs
3. Improve Google's positioning relative to its competitors, in order to generally benefit their other products more than it costs
4. Meet one of Google's non-monetary goals in a way that they feel is "worth" the cost and is offset by other income

Ingress: Google's augmented reality MMO

Ingress logo

+Ingress is Google's new augmented reality game that's currently in beta. It brings together a few things: first off, it's Android-only at the moment and has a strong preference for players and developers communicating via Google+. This is an obvious play for increased adoption of both platforms.

That aside, however, Ingress is the first MMO that I've played where the first step is, "go outside," and as you play the game you get a definite sense that Google isn't kidding about that. The game won't allow you to set your phone in location debugging mode (I suppose if I loaded a custom Android image, I could defeat that, but realistically it would be self-defeating) and they choose locations that are artistic or historical for elements of the game.

Google and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

I've seen many Google search result statistics articles around the Web, but I couldn't find one about the Presidential race. This is one of my favorite games, so I decided to give it a shot, and created Google the Vote (a play on MTV's "Rock the Vote") with questions ranging from issues of trust to likability. Each question is formed by adding the candidate's name into a simple phrase. For example, "Barack Obama as President" or "I can trust John McCain" (note that those aren't really the phrases used, as I don't want my blog to have an impact.

We then search for those phrases as exact matches on Google and take Google's estimated number of results. Only in one case do we get no results. I've found a number of things using this approach:

• Obama's results relating to trust have been declining
• McCain's basic Presidential search has been suffering a losing and widening gap with Barack Obama
• Neither candidate appears to be expected to balance the budget, though Obama simply has no results at all on this search!
• Both candidates may "feel the love" of their supporters, but Obama's supporters are quite a bit more vocal about it

I hope you enjoy this. I know I've enjoyed putting it together.

Gaming the phone: GOOG-411

You may know that by dialing "1-800-GOOG-411" you can access a voice-based Google search for businesses by city and state. Well, I just tried it out a few times, and found some amusing results. First, I tried "comic book shop" and was pleasently surprised that it recognized the phrase and found lots of matches. Then I tried something more generic, "thin crust pizza." It responded back with just "pizza" so I figured I was going to get a uselessly broad list, but it gave the name of the best known thin-crust Pizza in Cambridge, MA (Emma's).

I figured it was good, but I was going to really test it. What's a good test for such a system? What about a problem rather than a category? I tried "arachniphobia" and got a pause with some kind of odd sound, followed by "try again." Well, now I was on to something, so I tried simplifying: "phobias." Now I heard that sound again and it was a person saying "boop-de-bop" over and over very quietly. Of course, many voice-based services have a fake "the computer is working" noise, but I was amused to hear an actual human doing a sort of scat on this theme. Bravo for injecting a little humor, Google!

All things considered, GOOG-411 is a very solid service as far as I can tell. I'll have to try it in more rural areas next, but certainly for my next White Wolf game, I'll have to use this to decide where to order from!