Google seems to be everywhere. But where does the omnipresent company actually exist? This topic has gained a lot of attention lately from this Google Data Center FAQ to the subsequent map put together by the folks at Pingdom. But why is the location of the super-secret-yet-ubiquitous Google getting such a large amount of attention?

Google’s data centers have had a lot of attention around the country. In Oregon, initial secrecy surrounding the company’s development of The Dalles facility was an object of a lot of public discussion, which resulted in the facility earning the moniker of “Voldemort” (a reference to the fact that the Harry Potter series character is most commonly referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and that local officials couldn’t say the “G” word while the facility was under construction). But Google let up a bit and put on a more public face in 2007, including a site tour by local reporters from The Dalles Chronicle. Google had changed its tune on keeping the activities on site “super secret” after a public backlash concerning the 15-year tax break the company received from the State of Oregon, and power consumption concerns. Indeed, the energy consumption of the company’s data centers has attracted national media attention, beyond IT-focused outlets. As the company has grown in power over the past ten years, it has increasingly attracted attention, first with its quirky dot-com work environments and employees (including Google bean-bag chairs that grace the Googleplex), to controversy over acceptance of Chinese government restrictions over search-engine deployment.

But the company hasn’t turned to total transparency with all of their locations, and thus, members of the IT community still get excited when they can learn one more “secret” about where the company actually exists.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience? Secrecy is good for business, but up until what point? I come to TechTarget with a background in journalism and public affairs, so this question is not unfamiliar to me. Many companies rely on keeping their activities and intellectual property secured, it’s common in business. But, is Google being too extreme? Do their data center facility locations really need to be kept on the “down-low”? And why do datacenter insiders care?

I asked this question to Robert Cringley, of I, Cringley. And he gave me some interesting insight into the big-picture as it were.

“Google wants a peering relationship with every broadband ISP of substance,” explained Cringley. So, by having data centers located in proximity to ISPs, the ISPs and end-users benefit through high-speed connections at low cost. However, the self-serving part is that this relationship makes everyone more dependant on Google for everything (storage, search, carriage, etc.). “It’s all aimed at the ultimate replacement by Google of current audio and video distribution networks. Look 5-10 years out. That’s why geographic distribution is so important, because they really need to have a copy of the Google data set one hop from every broadband ISP.”

What do you think?