Google is not only the motive force behind every webmaster’s actions as they strive to get their website on the first page of its organic search engine results’ pages (SERPs) but they are also now putting some real muscle into their willingness to change the world for the better.

Without fanfare and in the public light Google have been trialling a cutting-edge car guidance system designed to allow your car drive itself – yep, you heard that right and what’s more they have succeeded in clocking in 140,000 miles some with minimal human intervention and a sizeable percentage of it with none at all. I know that right now petrolheads out there are getting all teary-eyed at the thought of their muscle cars being driven by robots (like the Johnny Cab in Total Recall). Now, most of us reading this are, probably, minimally attached to muscle cars as a way of life and regard driving, mostly, as a necessary chore in which case the prospect of being able to do more, utilising the time it takes to get from here to there, is a welcome prospect.

The technology to achieve all this is less than ten years away which means that Google rightly gets three cheers and the question being begged (isn’t there one always?) is what will they get out of it? On the face of it nothing. Google has been known to put resources in projects without an obvious profit motive in the hope of expanding its reach and utilising the opportunities presented, later.

The self-guided cars project is just such a case. Google, of course, is currently a one-product company with the bulk of its revenue coming from ads. It takes but a tiny change to the model (like the click-fraud scare at the beginning of 2005) to cause a total collapse, which means that they are under some pressure to find viable alternatives. Mobile search and the Android base are one but it is growing slowly and Google needs to have more irons in the fire.

Get people spending more time being connected and less time doing non-Google orientated stuff and you are onto a potential winner. Google knows this. It makes long-term business sense plus, in keeping with the Google spirit, it provides a total win-win scenario which is really hard to resist.

Imagine, for instance, if you had all your commuting time each morning to work on the SEO of your website? Then the only excuse for it not being on the first page of Google would be that it really did not deserve to be there in the first place.