Will Google Soon Be Available for Blockchains?
February 12, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
The search engine giant Google extends its product range with a search engine service for blockchains. Google is trying to be ahead of demand and to position itself in a market segment that has immense potential in the future.
When it comes to cloud computing, Google is far behind Amazon and Microsoft. Google’s estimated $3 billion in revenue from cloud services last year. Meanwhile, Amazon and Microsoft generated about $27 billion and $10 billion, respectively.
However, it has turned out that Senior Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, Allen Day is working on developing a search engine that will essentially become Google for blockchains.
Google is said to have quietly started loading data for the entire Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain into Google’s big data analytics platform BigQuery last year with a small team of open source developers. According to Forbes, with the help of the leading developer Evgeny Medvedev, a series of sophisticated software has been developed that allows data to be searched. Quasi a Google for Blockchains.
Allen Day hopes his Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load) project will help Google to bottom out. But here too, Google is far from the party. Amazon entered the blockchain area in 2018 with a set of tools for building and managing Distributed Ledgers. Microsoft kicked the room in 2015 and released tools for Ethereum’s blockchain. The Azure Blockchain Workbench now offers a range of services.
Amazon and Microsoft strongly focus their products on facilitating the creation of blockchain applications. Google, however, is taking a different approach with its project led by Allen Day. The goal of Day is to find out how and by whom Blockchains are actually used.
In the eyes of Day, shifting further economic activity to Blockchain will not only require some level of consensus-based confidence. In his opinion, it also requires knowing who is actually interacting with. In conclusion, according to Day, some of the anonymity features so highly valued by the crypto scene would have to be abandoned.
Blockchain ETL — Google for Blockchains?
Day has worked with Google’s big data analytics platform BigQuery. He and his team have entered the data from the blockchains Bitcoin and Ethereum into the platform to develop ways to navigate and analyze. The result is the development of a set of sophisticated tools that can be used to search the data.
The project is currently called Blockchain ETL and has been adopted by a variety of development teams who have used the data for their own projects. Incredibly, despite the lack of publicity, more than 500 projects were developed with the tools last year. These projects ranged from price forecasts for Bitcoin to the analysis of wealth distribution between crypto-listeners.
While software such as Block Explorer allows users to search only for specific transactions, Google’s Blockchain ETL is geared towards a generalized search. This is not the search for individual transactions in the foreground but the search for entire ecosystems of transactions.
A Danish developer also used Blockchain ETL to map all transactions on the Ripple blockchain.
The uploading of blockchains continues
There’s no doubt that Google is a late bloomer in Blockchain, but it’s about to be made good again. Because the plans of Day do not end here. He plans to add more blockchains such as Litecoin, Zcash, Dash, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic and Dogecoin to BigQuery.
According to himself, Day is interested in quantifying the data to see what the legitimate use cases of blockchain are. Building on this, one could then find out what the technology would otherwise be suitable for in the future.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Image credit: Forbes
