My Latest Theory

Google is the government. It started out a a private company, and for the day-to-day operations it still is. It's just guided by the government and the huge amounts of information collected by the various Google services go to the government. Where of course they have no idea what to do with it, but that's besides the point.

Think about it. Gmail not only scans every single email message, but they tell everyone and nobody minds. Google offers a search function so popular that's it's become a verb. They show you satellite pictures of pretty much anywhere you want. And there's free web pages, maps, shopping, instant messages, calendar, translation. They even have a desktop search that indexes every single file on your hard drive. And it's all free. I can't see goodwill as the prime motivation for all that, much less the funding source.