When I first encountered Google in 1998, while working on an upcoming
ecommerce site (I noticed all these GoogleBot entries in my webserver
logs), I was impressed with the search engine's simplicity, performance,
and ability to show me apparently very relevant results.

While I write this, I wonder if Google is the new Evil Empire. No 
longer in some garage somewhere, it is sucking IT's best talent from 
all over the world and building an adsense-driven web experience like
nothing we've seen before. At least the ads look better, and integrate
better into your website. But, they are still advertisements, which will
always be a bit ugly in my mind.

I actually commend Google for their many contributions to the internet
experience, but some of the things they've done recently are getting
quite disturbing. I'll mention the two that make me the most wary:


Censoring Chinese Search Results
Google has a deal with the Chinese government to censor results that
have keywords that government dislikes. This deal allows Google to 
do business in China, but it puts the company in a collusionary 
relationship with the oppressive, anti-democratic government of the
largest country in the world.


Google Desktop Search is EVIL!!!
Google recently paid Dell a huge amount of money to get a shortcut 
installed on all Dell desktops to install the Google Desktop Search.
On the face of it, desktop search is a really cool, useful tool, as 
those of us who can never remember where they put this or that file
- or even what they might have named it - can just enter some words 
that might be in the file and find it quickly. The problem is, and
this is big, folks: THE INDEX LIVES ON GOOGLE's SERVERS! Your
tax returns, proprietary company information, personal diary, photos,
whatever you do on your computer now lives on Google's servers where
they claim it isn't being used for anything nefarious but are you
prepared to believe them just because you are getting something of
value from them in return? Even if their motives are on the up-and-up,
what if someone actually nefarious (think Homeland Security) gets 
access to this information? Do you like the implication?

If you value privacy, if you don't want your proprietary information
to end up on the wild Internet, then turn off Google Desktop Search
and forbid your users from using it now!

There is actually a way to configure Google Desktop not to save your
information in their central indexes, but it is just too easy to use
the default configuration without realizing the implications.

I'm not saying Google is evil, but it is currently doing more and more
apparently evil things. Can you guess how they may behave when they start 
getting actual competition in the marketplace?

PS.
Note how contradictory I am, with my "Get Firefox with Google Toolbar" link 
in the upper-right of all my pages. This is just an experiment, to see if I 
can actually get a dollar out of it (for me to get a dollar, one of you
Winblows users needs to click on the link, download and install Firefox for
the first time, and then run it at least once). Firefox is an excellent 
browser, and Google does now employ a good amount of the talent behind it.

© 2006 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Opinion] permanent link