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Well this is just amazing ... somehow I've made it through another totally crazy week and arrived at Friday.

And it has been crazy ... there's been plenty of long hours spent in front of a computer screen ... several new projects people want us to launch ... a lot of "old" clients coming back for upgrades ... and even the expectation that I could train someone to add regular updates to a rather complicated WordPress installation.

Now that last job doesn't sound all that crazy until you understand that the person I'm supposed to train has a recognised disability that prevents them from remembering just about anything. They can, and have, come into the office for an hour's training and completely forgotten everything we talked about before they've left the building.

They don't even remember that I've given them instruction sheets. Think about it and you will begin to understand why I was just about ready to tear my hair out yesterday.

But my crazy week is nothing compared to something that Matt Cutts said at Pubcon earlier in the week. It's something that a lot of people seemed to miss but a couple of people were awake during Matt Cutts keynote address and they heard him admit that while Google has attempted to organise the world's information it has never thought of itself as a search engine.

Various Google mouthpieces may have ... from time to time ... referred to Google as a search engine but back at the mothership the group mind does not think of itself in that way at all.

So let your mind wander over that statement for a few minutes and think about the implications of what that statement means.

The first thing he said was that Google wants to gather the world's information ... that's something we've always known but I wonder if anyone ever bothered to ask why they would want to do that information?

Then there's the statement that Google does not think of itself as a search engine ... so if it's not a search engine then what is it and what does it want to do with the all that information it has gathered and goes on gathering?

I think that the key to seeing what might be coming next is being able to divorce your mind from that long-held belief that Google is a search engine. If you can do that you then begin to see all the possible scenarios for the future of Google and all those who have built websites over the years. Sadly none of them look particularly rosey.

Also think about why Google has chosen this point in time to correct the way we think about it. Never be fooled into thinking that Matt Cutts ever lets anything just slip even if some of the things he says seem like simple off-the-cuff remarks.

He chooses his words carefully and he reveals what Google wants him to reveal and at the times that Google wants them revealed. If you accept that you might begin to wonder if Google now thinks that it has such a complete hold on the marketplace that it can reveal it's true intentions.

Personally I think it does think that. Google now permeates our society at almost every level and it knows that society is not going to turn away from it. In fact we can't live without Google ... if it shut down tomorrow there would be chaos as we tried to go back to the days when there was no Google. We would never find anything.

So now we're going to see the true Google ... the Google that controls the world's information but is not the altruistic search engine we all thought it was ... and Google is going to make some of us pay for something we always thought would be free.

Some will pay simply because that will be the only way to keep their business in front of the eyes of those who may want to buy what they're selling. Others will not be able to pay because the asking price will be far more than they could ever afford and they're the ones that I tend to feel sorry for.

They've built their small online businesses on the back of free traffic ... they have either never wanted or never been able to expand beyond the level of a cottage industry. At some time in the future ... if it hasn't happened already ... they will see their traffic fall away to nothing and as their traffic drops so too will their sales and their income.

So are you ready for the real Google to come out from behind the curtain?