Dont get me wrong, almost all of us love Google to death. It has single-handedly changed the direction of this entire industry to something that is accessible for everyone. However, while Google is the darling poster child of Wall Street and the general public, there lurks a danger of abuse. We will cover this in a bit, but first lets look at a few years ago when the World Wide Web was still a novel concept.
We had a handful of methods of finding information. They were so-called search engines. Their names were Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and of course Alta Vista. If someone wanted to find a piece of information on this World Wide Web, they would enter their keywords into one of the above named search engines and would then begin the long arduous process of sorting through a lot of garbage before finding what they were looking for. Somewhere along the way, each of these companies got it into their corporate heads that what people wanted was even more fluff thrown at them.
This is when they became portals instead of search engines. Instead of offering just search results for what we were looking for, we now had stock quotes, weather reports, movie reviews, news reports,...