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Why Google Could Hold The Keys To The White House

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This article is more than 9 years old.

One of the keys to successful investing is to be ahead of the crowd. Technology in particular changes fast enough that most people, companies and especially institutions are often years behind what is happening on the ground. As we age we can feel and see that for ourselves. What the blazes are the young people doing?

We all live a little in the past and when the future arrives most people are left struggling to catch up.

When I was pioneering in multiplayer games in the 1980s and1990s most people hadn’t a clue why they would want email. Connecting their computer to a server wasn’t an issue, they didn’t have a computer and didn’t see why they ever would. That might be before some of you were born, but for me that feels like yesterday.

The ironic thing is, old fogies my age are actually running the show. We are the age group in power and more ironic still we are largely out of touch with the new dynamics increasingly driving reality. This can lead to acute problems, as the new paradigm breaks something important and no one even knows it has happened. This is the case for the flinty old folks that rule the politics of America. They seem to be missing something big, crucial and critical to the future of American democracy.

I will frame the issue in a rhetorical question: “How can a Republican president ever be elected when the Web search engine monopoly is Democrat?”

If all the newspapers and TV channels were Democrat or every media outlet ran by rabidly republican Fox, there would be uproar, outrage and riot. Yet these medias are now clearly being overwhelmed by the Internet. The Internet meanwhile is overwhelmed by Google. Google is the meta media. Media isn’t the message anymore, Google is the message.

Hold that thought.

“Google is the message.”

Read Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains. I like the bit that says, “The data analytics team.... Is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million vote margin of victory.”

You really don’t have to be a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory crank, to start noodling on the implications of the Chair of Google sorting out the data mining for Obama’s campaign to root out the right people to send the right message too.

Unless of course you haven’t heard of SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting a high profile on search engines, it means knowing how to kiss Google’s databases on the right port so their algorithms like you. Do it right and it means you get better ranking on Google than others. Have bad SEO and you are going out of business, have good SEO and you will be rich. I hope you follow me now.

Positive Google bias = search engine oxygen = life

Favorable access to Google or a favorable relationship with Google is the golden ticket. So when the Chairman of Google is taking time out of business to help a party get elected “thru data mining” you are going to get a margin of victory but the only “surprising” part of it is no one calls “foul.”

I’m not an American voter so can claim to be non-partisan, so I’m just pointing out the fact that Google is an unregulated monopoly that holds the keys to the White House. No one knows what its algorithms do, how or why, even though millions of jobs depend on their results, including that of the U.S. president.

If you are a Democrat you should buy the stock, if you are a Republican... well it doesn’t matter because you are toast.

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Clem Chambers is the CEO of leading private investors Web site ADVFN.com and author of The Game in Wall Street and Letters to my Broker.