Awwwwwwwww here come the banner ads!
Maybe not, but Google is slowly, slowly turning into a portal. You may remember portals from the nineties, when the web’s business plan was
1. Get a web site
2. Turn it into a portal
4. Profit
but when the actual chain of events went a lot more like
- Create a lovely site that people like, but that you can’t charge them for
- Pervert everything that made it good with stock quotes, recipes, and spy-cam pop-ups
- Go out of business so fast the repo man chars your carpet on his way out
(Infoseek.com used to look just like Google; now it looks like somebody vomited the Sunday paper. Come back, little Infoseek! All is forgiven!)
Google, however, is not about your “rules.” This is what they have in mind. First impression?: at least you’ll have the ability to turn it off. For a while.