A combination of good ranking strategies, good web-design, non-intrusive advertising, and licensing its technology to other players has endeared it to millions of Net users while generating good strong revenues.

After several years spent spidering the Web for material to index, Google now claims to have a list of some 2,073,418,204 web pages in its database -- something that must surely be an asset of immense value.

However, Google has a problem. How can it leverage that massive asset to generate more revenue?

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

I dare say this question has exercised the minds of Google's management and staff for quite some time -- and it appears that some bright spark has finally recognised that maybe they need help.

As a result, they're now offering what they call a Programming Contest with a US$10,000 first prize.

The challenge is to come up with program "that does something interesting with the data".

This is quite a smart move on the part of Google.

Not only do they now have many thousands of bright-sparks thinking hard in an attempt to come up with clever ideas to better leverage the company's massive database (for profit) -- but they also get to use any or all of the ideas submitted without payment of further fees or royalties.

With a really good programmer costing around US$50-$80K a year (plus benefits) then that US$10,000 first prize starts to look like a really cheap way of effectively hiring thousands of staff for a pittance.

However, it's not quite as easy or as lucrative as that. Of course someone (or some small army) with good technical skills is going to have to sort through the many thousands of submissions that will inevitably result from this competition.

The cost of weeding out the huge percentage of entries that are likely to be utterly useless won't be insignificant. Never the less -- it will only take one or two really good ideas to offset that overhead.

Now we keep hearing that NZ's programmers and techies are world-leaders (and I think this is quite true in many cases) -- so I wonder how many locals will be submitting an entry. Or could it be that Kiwis are just a bit too smart to give away an idea that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in return for five minutes of fame and some shiny beads?

If you come up with a good idea to commercially exploit that massive database, don't enter the Google contest -- just keep it to yourself then approach them later with a revenue-sharing deal. Forget the shiny beads and blankets -- go for the real money!

No Lighten Up?
Come on folks -- I need more material for the Friday "Lighten Up" section.

As you'll have noticed -- there is no "Lighten Up" today -- because I've been too busy to find anything and submissions have dried up somewhat.

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