No, Google is an information aggregation company. I'm spending the summer in a town I don't know much about, and today, I wanted a sandwich, and my refrigerato

No, Google is an information aggregation company. I'm spending the summer in a town I don't know much about, and today, I wanted a sandwich, and my refrigerator was empty. So I went to Google Maps, and typed in "Intersection of $street1 and $street2, $town, $state to sandwiches". Yes, "to sandwiches." And it gave me a list of sandwich shops ordered by distance from my apartment. I clicked on one, saw the map directions, and went for a walk to grab myself a Subway. Think about this for a second--the vast number of different levels of data aggregation, along with language parsing and tagging, necessary for such a seamless system to exist--yet it becomes incredibly useful in practice. And with useful services, especially useful services that allow people to search for commercial products--be it a sandwich or a computer--comes advertising money. But the reason they can be an advertising company is because of their information aggregation. The ads are just a way to make money off of their core idea.