During her Q&A session at the Search Engine Strategies conference yesterday, Google's vice-president of search products & user experience described her company's Book Search service as "a great endeavour as a cause".

"Imagine what it would be like to have all written and published information online and searchable. What that could mean in terms of just people's ability to educate themselves and find information [and Google making more money selling advertising!]. It could be really profound [yes, indeed... for Google's bottom line]", Marissa Mayer said.

Mayer also points out to the company's Google Desktop utiliy for Linux, Mac and Windows that represents, for her and probably for *all* Windows users, a computing shift [grin].

"Google Desktop does challenge the way people use computers. Myself, I'm far less organised on my computer now. I don't need to worry about filing things into particular folders so I can find them later because I have Google Desktop in order to find it.", said the Google VP.

Computing shift?

"It's the idea the activities that you do on a machine could also be used to help find relevant content for you in the form of the side bar [...] And search across computers pushes towards the idea that you store information online and collaborate with people across it"

[...]

"And Desktop by actually allowing people to search across computers and ports that information into the cloud really does push towards the idea that you are not as tied to the physical machine that you use and that you can get at your files, your history, your action, streamed from anywhere."