A very small news item about Google distributing Google Desktop on USB drives caught my eye this morning. There's more to this deal than meets the eye, and it represents Google's next big search initiative.

Two years ago when Google bought Blogger, many people speculated that the search giant was building the Memex. Steven Johnson hypothesized in Slate that Google's acquisition could "help you keep track of what you've already found." Matt Webb suggested that Google understood that the truly valuable information was the interconnected trail of data, not the individual units.

But that whole Memex thing never came to fruition. A quick search for mentions of Google and Memex, or Google and Desktop and Memex, reveals that mentions of that idea pretty much ceased early in 2004.

Everybody realized that Google wasn't building the Memex, it was building an advertising empire. Blogger was the first big step. Blogger meant freshly minted Web pages at the rate of millions per year. And on those pages, freshly minted contextual advertising.

This isn't anything new. The speculation about a Memex Xanadu seems charming now. Certainly, Google has become our outboard brain. It's also become our personal billboard.

It's received wisdom that in order to keep selling advertising, Google has to continually find new stockpiles of information. Organizing the Web and selling ads on its pages was the easy part. So was plopping ads on Weblogs. And despite the legal hurdles, Book Search is pretty easy too, in a technical sense. Book publishing continues apace. All Google has to do is scan the things in.

But where is the next stockpile of information that Google can sell advertising around? All the consolidated mother lodes are gone. What's left is disparate, unconnected data waiting for a joist.

Of course, Google Base is Google's attempt to consolidate that disparate information into a centralized area. It's an ingenious idea. You give Google data and it organizes it for you, makes it searchable. Now that data is in a centralized area and has ads around it. Again, Google doesn't have to do anything but sit back and wait for the data to come to the Base.

But the problem with Google Base is that it relies on people to push data to it. The upload mechanism right now is a bit inefficient.

How can Google speed up the data transfer to Google Base? Make it possible for you to automatically publish your data to Google Base. How could Google do that? Google Desktop. How can Google get Google Desktop into the hands of non-early adopters? Lexar's USB drives.

If that sounds farfetched, consider that Lexar is one of the leading, if not the leading, flash memory manufacturers in the world. Lexar also provides flash memory devices to all the major digital camera manufacturers. What else is on Lexar's USB drives now? Picasa.

This deal with Lexar is a win for Google whether or not the company uses the applications on the USB drive to automatically upload content (with the user's permission) to Google Base. But the revenue potential increases significantly if Google leverages all that distributed content into a consolidated arena. That would drive content, eyeballs and ads on Google Base.

And as Google's desktop applications land on more and more hard drives, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Google get into the P2P space. Imagine searching, not only the Web, but also the information that other people make public on their hard drives. Next year, don't be surprised if there's a little check box during Google Desktop's installation which says "Share my files."

eBay, Craigslist, and any other service that relies on users actually visiting a Web site and physically entering information should be very worried.

And while Google's software is proliferating on users' machines, its hardware is proliferating in server stacks.

So watch out. For better or worse, Google is about to become the embedded browser of the next information war.

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