Google Desktop and P2P

Now this was an interesting opinion piece - Google Desktop Is P2P in Sheep's Clothing at Publish

The article says

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.

Then came Google 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.

So now we have Google Desktop on USB drives and which can be used to automatically upload content to 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."

Farfetched, but interesting. But the idea that the content has to be uploaded on 'the base' makes it essentially non P2P and just a brute force workaround with limited scope - storage doesn't come free, even for Google.