Google is working on a new project to create a search engine for blockchains. The search giant has thus decided to expand its capabilities, getting ahead of future demand for such a tool. Google decided to work on the new project, otherwise it would have too large a gap in this technology, especially compared to such giants as Microsoft and Amazon, which already have their own blockchain systems.
Senior Google Cloud developer Allen Day is working on creating a search engine that will become a «Google for blockchains». Day works on the BigQuery platform, designed for analyzing super-arrays of data. Together with the team, he is entering data from the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains into his platform in order to develop ways to navigate and analyze them. The result should be the creation of a set of complex tools that can be used to search data.
At the moment, work is underway on «ETL» - the «extraction, transformation, loading» of data from the blockchain. And the development group is already using such data to develop individual projects. Interestingly, over the past year more than 500 projects have been developed with the help of such tools, and they range from Bitcoin price forecasts to analysis of the distribution of funds among HODLers.
Day himself is now focused on the use of blockchains by artificial intelligence (AI). For example, he studied the operation of AI bots on the Ethereum blockchain and came to the conclusion that the large volume of trading in Ether, which has already lost second place in the ranking and more than 80% of its value, was the result of fictitious trading using bots – this is a practice of crypto exchanges aimed at inflating the price of ether. Day hopes that as the appropriate tools are developed, such problems will be solved. «In the future, a certain level of consensus trust alone will not be enough for the network's economic activity. This will also require trust in the on-network reputation of those with whom you interact». One Danish developer is also using ETL to depict a map of transactions in the Ripple network, whose data already weighed 400 GB back in August of last year. In the image, the largest crypto exchanges are visible as black craters, and it seems to resemble the surface of the moon, or even some kind of cellular organism.
Google entered the blockchain industry somewhat late. Last year Amazon already received a set of tools for creating and managing blockchains. Microsoft began working in this direction back in 2015 and developed the Azure Blockchain Workbench starter toolkit based on Ethereum. The companies are already generating income from these ventures: last year Amazon earned $27 billion on its cloud services, while Microsoft earned $10 billion. And Google has so far earned only $3 billion. «All this time Google has been like a sleeping giant in blockchain», - says BlockApps CEO Kieren James-Lubin. It seems that now everything is set to change. Day's plans are big – to add the Litecoin, ZCash, Dash, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic and Dogecoin blockchains to BigQuery. He says: «It is very interesting to arrive at a quantitative assessment so that we can see legitimate use cases for blockchains. Having figured out what these technologies are really suitable for, one can also come to consider new use cases for them».
