Are Partnerships a Thing of the Past?

At some point, they will be — for example: In the not too distant future, it will be possible to create a list of everyone who offers products and/or services of a particular type at a specific geographic location.

This point hasn’t happened yet (though most people don’t realize that). At the moment, when you search for something on Google, you will get results from Google’s partners (for example, businesses that pay Google a lot of money in order to show up, or online versions of newspapers of magazines that run Google advertising on their websites). Only really stupid people think that Google shows you everything. Google’s top 10 result are not everything! Google will never show you more than 1000 results (and often far less).

Let’s say Google actually did show everything — so if you searched for “barbers in NYC” and there were hundreds of barbers in New York City, then Google actually would show you all of those hundreds of barbers. Would an individual barber shop even want that? Many barbers today might say: “I don’t want the barber shop from across the street listed next to me.” Well, I would ask those barbers: “When you order a pizza, do you want to see every pizza parlor, or just some of them — Google’s partners?… the ones who pay Google a lot of money to show up?” My hunch is that most people don’t want to see any of the sites where people pay to show up — but then the question is: Why do you use Google at all? Just so the NSA can spy on you?