Monday, September 1, 2003

Google Paranoia

Today Doug Mohney asks “Is Google the next Microsoft?” ...

“Hey Joe, what are we going to do about this idiot reporter?”
“His publisher paying for AdWord placement?”
“No”
“Ah, screw him. Bury them both in PageRank."
– Doug Mohney, Is Google the next Microsoft?, 01 September 2003

... and concludes that whatever the case, there’s just no alternative to it. Talking about censorship; Slashdot reports Google Removes Links in Response to DMCA Complaint. And German Abakus SEO Blog is spreading the rumour that Google is sending out a virus via their newsletter, but all I can see is a reference to Yahoo! Group “Google Friends”.

What I believe is that Google will not become Microsoft because the choice of a search engine is a free and quick one. You don’t need to buy a special text editor just to read the office documents; you don’t need to buy the default OS installed; you don’t need to rely on the OS which has the most available software; and so on.

On the other hand if Google would start to abuse their power and radically change the service they provide, the word will spread very quickly. A lot of people like me are watching Google Inc’s every move. Censorship of any kind, like done for a long time already with certain German Nazi-Sites (which cannot be located in German Google) is a step in the wrong direction; especially when Google Inc. started to couple it with a more brutal geolocation feature which made it next to impossible to escape the localized Google (they took back that feature after many comments from users, partly voiced over at WebMasterWorld’s Google Forum).

Paranoia is good. But we shouldn’t feel powerless. On the Web, the shortest distance connecting two points is a single click.

Google Paranoia by Philipp Lenssen

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