10 shadows hanging over Google: does Google have a dark side?

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In a recent article on Microsoft’s bing, I felt it necessary to temper my enthusiasm for Microsoft’s commitment to web search by noting Microsoft’s decidedly checkered record as a good net citizen. What about Google?

It is almost too easy to write a glowing review of whatever new service Google unleashes. For example,

• Google Maps Street View enables us to preview a new client’s street and building prior to a first visit – a boon in city environments
• Google Translate has improved so significantly of late that it really is useful in providing rough draft translations of search marketing articles
• Google Squared provides an innovative take on structuring search results for items with multiple attributes.

However while enthusing over Google’s services one might ask,

Does Google have an underlying dark side? If so, need anyone care?

Possibly. Some in the traditional media have considered certain aspects of this question, such as Die Zeit’s front page piece on Google and our privacy, Google, the spy we love.

Consider the implications of one company, any company, potentially controlling the web sites we are allowed to find, our email, our documents, our online payment system, our health records….

For many, it is probably easy to dismiss concerns about Google’s reach. Yet as someone who has lived in a country run by a dictatorship, I’d simply like to invite the reader to think for a minute. Historically, complacency has led to havoc.

In no particular order, I’ve listed some of the unresolved conflicts of interest, contradictions or wanting transparency which seem to detract from an otherwise excellent company.

1. Google is the world’s largest crawler of websites, yet refuses to let others crawl Google’s search results. Google doesn’t officially allow any software to capture Google search results needed to compile ranking reports for competitor analysis and benchmarking. It is true that many arguments can be made against the usefulness of ranking reports in an era of blended, local and personalized results.
   

   That said, this is a straight forward case of what is good for the gander is not good for the goose.

2. Through Google Trends for Websites, Google offers website traffic data for websites… except Google’s.*. What’s wrong with this picture?
3. Through its AdSense for domains, Google encourages companies to squat on domains they have no intention of using for websites. Despite continuous invitations to create quality websites with compelling content, this program rewards people who do nothing but place AdWords ads on empty sites – indefinitely. Anyone who has searched for a .com domain name will probably understand how this behavior chafes.
4. Google’s mission of making the world’s information universally accessible should not be compatible with censorship.
5. Google doesn’t share slides presented in public at conferences except in the seemingly rare cases that the Google employee solicits and receives clearance ahead of time. Is this behavior appropriate for a company based on making the world’s information readily available. I noted this problem last year during Google’s Editech 2008 presentation; Michael Gray wrote about it after February’s SMX West conference.
6. Google is in bed with the NSA/CIA. This point is hard to prove or disprove – it may be just noise. Yet it is true that high ranking Google employee Matt Cutts interned with the US Department of Defense (NSA?); he implies he doesn’t have a current security clearance. It is certainly true that telecommunications firms provided data,without subscriber consent, to the Bush administration. My view is that it would be naive if we didn’t simply assume that the US government (and others?) could access any Google data at any time. To be fair, this would be true for Microsoft and Yahoo! as well.
7. Owning content hosting or creation properties while controlling what content appears in search results is an unresolved conflict of interest. Do other video hosting companies share an equal footing with YouTube in Google’s search results? There might be $1.65 billion reasons to be skeptical.
8. Transparency and openness are inconsistently applied by Google. In markets Google doesn’t control, e.g., cell phones and office productivity apps, Google is as open as it gets. Yet in the core areas of classified advertising (think AdWords Quality Score) and search data (APIs to access crawl and results data), Google is as closed as Microsoft has been historically on the PC.
9. Google essentially controls access to information on the web via its effective monopoly in most markets where it operates, yet there is no independent ombudsman to adjudicate when a site is banned from Google. This is one of the reasons to wish Microsoft well with Bing.
10. Google destroys businesses. The purchase of Urchin and the release of Urchin’s hosted version as the free Google Analytics undoubtedly provided a needed boost to the field of Web Analytics, yet it also served as the catalyst for the “consolidation” of web analytic tool suppliers, leaving just a few vendors left (i.e. Omniture, Web Trends and Coremetics probably share most of the paid tool market at this point); ClickTracks is a notable victim. A sacrifice for the greater good? Followers of search engine news will know the press has a love-hate relationship with Google. Copiepresse in Belgium won a judgment against Google for copyright infringement. Newspapers continue to accuse Google of parasitic behavior. Yet my own feeling here is that Microsoft has been much more efficient than Google as a company killer. Think of the fate of RealPlayer, Netscape, WordPerfect, Lotus 123, just to name a few. Google doesn’t seem to have actively worked to drive direct or indirect competitors out of business, but I’ll leave it to the reader to make an argument for or against this point.

In Google’s defense, we might be holding Google to higher standards than we hold other companies… but then maybe Google has encouraged us to do so.

Dear reader, it is time for you to have your say: Is it Saint Google or Devilish Google?

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