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conspiracy.google.com

I am a borderline obsessive fan of google earth, zipping through the Grand Canyon, checking out the Eiffel Tower, zooming in on friend’s houses. For my money (actually I use the free version, but you get the idea) it doesn’t get better than that. I also adore google maps, I mean, a hybrid map/satellite picture? How cool is that? Once I discovered google maps, I was an instant mapquest convert, and until just recently, I never looked back.
While recently planning a trip to Los Angeles, I of course went straight to google maps to plan my route, but was surprised when they proposed a somewhat, shall we say, unorthodox way of getting out of town. Now, getting out of town had not been the reason that I had mapped it. I thought I knew the best way to get out of town just from having lived there for about forever. I had mostly wanted help getting into LA.
So, when the new route came up, I tried to figure out why, in google earth, we’d want to go across town, catch a two lane highway, take it out to the middle of nowhere, then catch the same interstate way out of town that we lived right next to and could have just gotten onto in the first place. “Perhaps,” I thought, “this is actually the shortest route, even shorter than the more obvious way that I had intended to go.
So, just for kicks, I put the same info into mapquest, who proposed the exact route that I had originally been planning to take. And not only was google’s route not shorter, it also considerably more time consuming. (Interestingly, the routes were the same once they met up outside of town at the interstate.) I chalked it up to google maps still being in beta, took my original route and didn’t give it a second thought.
Until the accident.
As we headed out of town on the interstate, our vision was suddenly filled with the unwelcome glow of a sea of brake lights ahead of us. We inched past a policeman sitting on the side of the road flashing his lights in a too little too late attempt at warning us of what lay ahead. Finally we saw it, the kiss of death to our efforts at timeliness. Three orange cones and a little sign: Accident Ahead. We sat and sat. We waited and waited. We craned our necks and hoped for a glimpse. Finally we saw it: most of a semi truck and some pieces of a car. Eventually traffic opened up, but it wasn’t until just after that when I noticed the junction from google’s would be route that I began to wonder.
There seemed to be no real reason for google’s odd route. It knows about the other freeways, in fact, it’s planned me routes on them many times. It wasn’t shorter, it wasn’t faster, so why? Why would it suggest such and odd, out of the way, longer, slower route?
Now the conspiracy theorist in me would suggest that google has grown into such a huge corporation, with a tiny little “evil room” somewhere, buried in a basement far from the light of day with a little sign on it that reads: Beta Utilization Optimization. And in this little room, they plan accidents, and then plan routes around them to entice users to use their product, instead of their competitor’s.
But, the Pollyanna in me won’t allow me to believe that any corporation, no matter how huge, or how evil, could stoop to such malicious lows. So, I propose that google maps is in fact a front for a super secret new project: google future.
Seriously, think about it. Millions of people, all over the world consult horoscopes, tarot cards and psychics, to name a few, because they believe that they can tell them the future. What do you suppose are the odds that no one at google believes this, too?
Considering that their stated goal is to catalog just about everything, might that not include the future? Isn’t this just the sort of cutting edge, ahead of the curve, out of the box thinking that has been google’s trademark since their inception? I submit that indeed it is.
I consider it infinitely more likely that instead of a “Beta Utilization Optimization” room where accidents are planned, that there is an unmarked room, perhaps with a psychic and a crystal ball, where accidents are predicted rather than planned. Google is quietly implementing its secret pre-beta google future into the google maps program so that, perhaps years from now, when they introduce google future to a skeptical world audience, they can smile and say that drivers the world over have been using this very thing to avoid accidents for many years. Then just didn’t know it.

Perhaps you consider this to be ridiculous, outside the realm of technological possibilities. Then I would beg you to consider this: we, as the public, currently have access to technology that can report traffic conditions to us in real time. So, unless you would propose that the relentless progression of mankind, a progression that began at the dawn of time, is coming to a sudden end, then I would propose that this is the inevitable next step in our eternal march into: Google Future.

future.google.com
Coming To A Computer Near You. (We Have Foreseen It)