I remember the first time I heard the word Google. I was in New York, heading out to my parent’s house on Fire Island…yeah, you know, where all of the gay people are. Anyway, a friend of mine was talking to someone else and he mentioned Google. At the time I was running a few, ecommerce / retail sites that were making a nice hunk of change. He asked me if I use Google for all of my searches and I told him that I didn’t even know what it was. Clearly, I was a little lazy in keeping up on my technology. But, at that time, there were so many companies with names like Google, it was a joke. But, I digress.

In the midst of this major shakeup in the Google SERPs, I figured I would spend a little time today to see what other people were saying at DigitalPoint and Webmaster World about this seemingly never ending shuffle / update / algo change / insert your term here. I have seen our Adsense revenues just get pummeled in the past week or two and it is giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I can’t seem to make any sense out of it as it is affecting sites on just about every level.

I was talking to a buddy, today when the light bulb came on. This is total conspiracy theory, but what if all of this work was to build the world’s biggest ad server? Google collects all kinds of crazy data. Logging into one of my Google Sitemaps accounts (yeah I have more than one, nener nener nener) shows me what terms a site shows up for, what the average position is, and what terms generate the most clicks. We also know they collect this same type of data for Adwords and I am going to go out on a limb here and say that they most likely have the same data, or more, for Adsense…call me crazy. So, maybe this is just their way of building the biggest ad server that man has ever seen. Maybe we publishers are being used more than we ever thought. They know what sites generate the best CTR for a particular term, what ads work best in what page positions on what sites for a particular topic, they know it all. I think we are all kidding ourselves if we don’t think this is going on at some level right now at the “Googleplex” (what a gay name).

It will be great when they are running their own “free” WiFi network here in the Bay Area…then they will know all of this stuff, but also know where you live, how long your computer is left on, how many hours a day you spend on the WWW, how many IM messages you send, etc, etc, etc. People were afraid of big bad Ma Bell, she is baby shit (thanks Sheriff) compared to what Google has and will have in the months to come.

In closing, I would like to thank Google for the awesome wedding gift. I have enough crap to deal with in the next week and a half.