Tribune Series on Google

Parts 1 & 2 of the Chicago Tribune series on Google can be found here, at least for the time being. I copied them into Word and I'll be reading them in their entirety later. Excerpt: It wants every move on the Internet to go through its disarmingly simple home page, period. But to get there--and do it before Microsoft, Yahoo or any other challenger--Google must work its way into virtually every aspect of your life, from changing how you watch video to, someday soon, allowing you to comparison shop for wine with a price-scanning cell phone. Google has devised ways to make billions by linking advertisements to such queries. And to old-line industries, Google is scary in a Wal-Mart kind of way. It upends entire segments of the economy by coming up with cheaper, more efficient ways to serve customers. Inside the Googleplex, though, the company seems far less invincible. Google is learning it can't conquer everything. Recently, it demoted Froogle, the sputtering price-shopping service, off its home page in favor of a link to its version of online video, the latest mother lode of the Internet gold rush. Google had little choice. It is badly trailing YouTube, an upstart that has become the world's hottest video site. Dumping Froogle from its home page highlighted an often-ignored fact about Google: While the company started with a run of blockbuster hits--search, maps and Gmail--it hasn't had one since.