Google has become what dozens of companies were once in the boom days of the Internet economy -- a dot.com darling. Most of the dot.com darlings disappeared after the "new economy" went bust, but Google, like Yahoo and EBay, is definitely beyond the boom or bust horizon. Over the last several years the company has built a solid business, learning from past mistakes and developing a platform that continues to expand beyond its modest Web search roots.

It's not a stretch to think that Google has a goal to become the dominant search infrastructure for enterprises over the next five years. The company is still hiring top engineers at a rapid clip, and could focus on solving some of the problems associated with searching complex intranets and extranets with tens of millions of documents in disparate databases with hundreds of file formats. In addition, the company could also apply its prodigious brain power to solving some of the problems associated with filtering out irrelevant data by understanding the context of the information, similar to efforts underway for the Semantic Web.

Google already has projects underway to provide a search infrastructure for shopping, local services, catalogs, images, news and personalization. Google might not be the best for every type of search application, but having a common infrastructure for internal and external facing applications is an attractive proposition for enterprises looking to simplify IT infrastructure. With its expertise developed in dealing with 4 billion Web pages and 200 million queries per day, Google could also provide managed hosting services for businesses and individuals.

Google has expanded is offerings with blogging tools and social networking (Orkut) and recently introduced Gmail. A logical extension of Gmail would be a Gmail enterprise edition. The blogging and social networking tools could also be extended to support enterprises with strong security and features integrated with corporate portals. Finding people is another search-centric function. Google could provide a search infrastructure and identity management system for e-commerce and enterprises, building out from its native search capabilities. You could also imagine Google, and its competitors, as providers of thousand of Web services accessible through their search engines and specialized portals.

In addition, Google could give enterprises access to its technology. "Google could well open up its APIs for internal corporate partners and IT developers to play with through a very sophisticated dashboard," according to John Battelle, author of the Searchblog. "It could be a massive market for them, far more than search--it's EIS [Enterprise Information Systems], distributed apps, the works."

Google's AdSense, which places text-based advertising words on pages that are contextually relevant, might be just the initial stab at delivering the infrastructure for fully contextualized, monetized and personalized online presence.

Google could provide instantaneous translated of any file type—with enough horsepower—and new kinds of query interfaces for extracting data. A search for document related to a financial transaction could yield the relevant documents, show their relationships and display them according to various criteria gleaned from the metadata of each document.

Reporter Chris Gaither suggested in his article that if Google plays a more central role in a world in which every device in connected to the Internet, Microsoft's dominance on the desktop would be compromised. Google would not only handle Web searches but also personal or corporate file searches and potentially application serving with alternatives to Microsoft Office products.

Whether Google becomes the dominant search infrastructure inside and outside of the enterprise or evolves beyond search into managed services, content management, grids, and analytical applications is interesting speculation at this point. With an IPO, the company will have plenty of cash to invest in acquiring interesting technologies and entering new application areas.

What's important is that Google's success has spurred competitors—such as Yahoo and Microsoft—into action. They are doing everything they can to compete with each other, which ultimately benefits all users downstream. The danger is that ten years down the road Google becomes too much like Microsoft, using its market dominance to protect its turf in ways that stifle competition. We'll have to wait a few years to see what kind of corporate citizen Google turns out to be and if it can maintain its innovation-focused culture and organic growth.

You can write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.

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