What *isn't* Google doing?

Google. It started out as a research project written by two guys at Stanford, and now it's officially a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Since then, it's branched out to all kinds of other services, some of which you've probably used: Google Maps, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. However, they're also branching out into all kinds of other projects, and at this point it looks like it's only a matter of time before they take over the world.

1. Self-Driving Cars: Google announced on their blog a few days ago that they'd successfully tested automated cars. The cars have so far driven over 140,000 miles, using "video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to 'see' other traffic, as well as detailed maps [...] to navigate the road ahead". Very cool technology, and crazy to think that a company known for its search engine has designed... robot cars.
2. A JPEG Killer: Google has been working on a new image format, called WebP, which they're hoping will become the new dominant format for use on the web, instead of JPEG. According to the blog post which announced WebP, images make up about 65% of the information transmitted per webpage. Combined with the fact that WebP produces (on average) a 39% smaller file than JPEG, that would result in an average speed-up of about 25% for general web browsing.
3. Exploring the Deep Web: Even though Google has a mind-boggling amount of websites in its search databases, those pages only represent something often called the "Surface Web". The challenge lies in exploring data in the "Deep Web". The Surface Web consists of sites like Wikipedia, where you can find all the content (in theory) just by following links from one page to another. The Deep Web is, well, anything not on the Surface Web. One example would be data on airline flights: when they are, how much they cost, how nice the plane is, etc. All that info is out there and publicly available, but in order to access it, you'd have to actually fill in some search terms, such as searching all flights from DC to LA, which would result in the website searching its database to find info that matches your search. Traditionally, search engines are bad at searching the Deep Web, because it's hard to automate that process the way you can automate simple link-following. However, Google is getting better and better at indexing info in the Deep Web, by developing methods to choose the right kind of input for a given database, so that you search for city names if the page is about plane flights, or names of artists if it's about art, etc. You can read more about it in this New York Times article.