Yeah there are stories of hedge funds buying and then selling cars all over the country to find out the serial numbers so that they can estimate their sale coun

Yeah there are stories of hedge funds buying and then selling cars all over the country to find out the serial numbers so that they can estimate their sale count before the quarterly reports in a german tanks kind of fashion. Having good information is very valuable for hedge funds. However, I don't think that hedge funds are "Googly" products. They fail at the toothbrush test. They require massive capital investments, and while Google has lots of money, is it enough to drive enough revenue growth? Furthermore, there is the legal danger. With businesses using Google products, Google is likely in possession of insider information on most publicly traded information. E.g. when there is an internal meeting at a company and suddenly everyone is visiting job websites that use Google CDN hosted fonts, or maybe everyone is visiting websites looking for cars to buy or houses. Or think about internal company documents hosted on Google docs or that meeting being conducted over hangouts. How can Google ensure that their products don't accidentially use that insider info? How can they separate the toxic insider info from the okay to use non-insider info? Does that separation already constitute insider information? Lastly, Google possesses probably more information than most entities in history, and even today I'd put it into the top 10. They also have gigantic capabilities to organize that data, it's in fact the very core purpose of the company. If you possess perfect knowledge how a market will evolve, will someone want to trade stock with you? If you knew how a coin toss would turn out, would people want to make bets with you about the coin toss? Google getting into the hedge fund business might in fact not work because their buy or sell orders alone could change the stock value to a degree where Google doesn't make any money from it. I'm not an expert though, maybe there are mechanisms to counter this effect. Please correct me if I'm wrong.