Literally why Google exists: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/
That's the arm of Google whose mission is to spend $100 million per year on charitable projects.
Every company which makes such ridiculous amounts of money throws some of it at a cause or other, they get far more returns from it in PR than they would spending it another way.
Altruism? How about drop half on making the world better and not making a marketing circus from it.
1: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2015/Q4_google_earnin...
I think upping the numbers to where it's clearly a loss for whoever is donating would tip the scale more towards the 'good citizen' mark than these token amounts.
We'll never know if that works since no one has done it, and probably never will.
I'm not trying to call out google in particular, in fact that they even give this amount makes them better than many. These corporate statements about doing things "for the good of humanity" fall kind of flat when they do so little towards it though and I'm not sure why we buy into their marketing.
If your mission statement is to advance the species, or even give universal access to information for everyone; why would you sit on $84bn of yearly profit instead of using it to achieve that goal?
I know, life isn't as easy as that and I understand the reality of capitalism.
It's pie in the sky stuff, and before I'm flamed to death I'm not saying it's feasable and I'm not calling on it to happen, but just for the sake of discussion: am I the only one who thinks the change that apple, google and facebook could make to our species if they just gave 1/2 of their bank accounts would be significant and beneficial to everyone? Would it really make much difference to them if they have 400bn instead of 900bn in the bank?
shrug -- I don't have the answers.
I'm sure Google could work out some affiliate fee/scheme for directing the user to a marketplace to buy the book whose image is shown. But if Google directs the user to it's own marketplace, it would surely get a cut, no?
The US publishing industry is $28B. technical/educational books are 50% of that, And Google could only get 10% for that market(many other channels), and let's say they'll get 10% affiliate fee. that equals 28B * 0.5 * 0.1 * 0.1 = $140 million/year , for what they do currently.
Books are quite expensive, so adding visual links to the main search engine, would say double that - $280 million/yr. Not much for Google.
But on the negative side, adding visual links will distract people from surfing to sites filled with ads,clicking search ads, etc - so maybe it will cost Google money. Maybe a lot of money. That could be the logic behind why Google Forums, clearly a valuable service, was dumped[1].
So Google probably needs a more serious way to monetize it to justify the effort.
One idea(among many, surely): many people prefer visual explanations. In many subject areas, books offer better visual explanations. If when searching for something, Google would have also linked to some visual explanations from books(in the main search), and used machine learning to find the best - that may be really great, may really improve the experience and value of the web.
But is it legal ? it's unclear.
Can Google monetize that ? probably no.
Or am i wrong, is there some way Google can monetize that?