Building a better Google

What Should Google Do? is marketing and strategy guru Seth Godin's latest thought experiment. A 77-page PDF brainstorming session by Godin and readers of his blog on how the dominant search engine can build a better tomorrow.

It's a fast-paced, sometimes exhilarating read with people tossing out imaginative ideas on how to make Google even more indispensable. Many revolve around making the whole world searchable, including shopping malls (page 37) and even potential spouses (page 75).

Godin's own suggestion (page 11) is that Google build on its relationships with users so it can turn its already popular add-on browser toolbar into a universal e-wallet ("before Microsoft screws it up") for buying things online:

Now, whenever you visit a site, you can use the Google toolbar to pay for content, or small items. Suddenly, collecting a ten cent royalty to read a web page for a year is easy. Buying an mp3 or a pdf is trivial. Google keeps a penny or two per transaction. That’s enough.

The overall point, however, was "to show all of us how easy it us to unbox our thinking if we really want to," Godin wrote on FastCompany's blog.