I remember what it was like to try and find things on the Net in 1995. My favourite search engine at the time was WebCrawler. When that stopped working as well, I floated around Yahoo, Lycos, and others, never quite finding what I was looking for. Back then, bookmarks and homepage “links” pages were actually a good way to get around (ah… does anyone besides me remember BBS pages of phone numbers that invariably ended up in your “high speed” 14.4 modem accidentally calling confused old ladies at 3am? How I longed for some way to just “go” to the other BBS, and not have to hang up and try the number… But I digress).
Then I found Google. Wow… was I impressed. This was great! I could find what I needed, and I didn’t need to bookmark everything that was useful. I told all my friends (who were also online - this was at University). I told my family (who I’d convinced to get online). I remember actually saying “yes, there’s this site at www.google.com… that’s g-o-o-g…” to lots (and lots) of people. Google made the “links” pages on my own sites. I was an evangelist… hook, line, and sinker.
I still love Google, and I still tell people to use it. It’s my search engine, feed reader, email, home page, map, and lots of other things besides. It’s also my job to understand it and what it all means.
Google has had an incredible level of growth over the years, and when you consider just how much it has become a part of our busy lives, it’s easy to see why. Just look at the dizzying array of options and services they offer, with new services and options offered all the time. With their motto of “Don’t be evil”, Google has enjoyed a very long corporate honeymoon.
But there are rumblings in Search Wonderland. There has been the occasional concern about privacy raised over the years, but it hasn’t come to much, really.
In the last few days, however, these rumblings have been increasing in volume, and it would appear that perhaps a full-fledged storm may be on Google’s horizon.
Take for example, a recent video voicing concern about Google produced by Ozan Halici & Jürgen Mayer - students at the University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Germany. The thesis of the video is that Google just knows too much. Robert Cringely also recently posted an article on PBS called When Being a Verb is Not Enough, about Google secretly buying up bandwidth rights. John McBride wrote recently of his concern with some U.S. government officials signing nondisclosure agreements with Google during negotiations regarding the new data center in North Carolina. Jeremy Zawodny (from Yahoo) notes that Google has been buying up a lot of digital information archives.
Now granted, it’s not quite time to break out the tinfoil hats and move underground. Some of these claims are somewhat doubtful, and some are a little sensationalized. But regardless of what conclusions you may draw, it certainly does seem to be the case that Google may no longer be the “little” Search Engine that could do no evil, in the public eye.
Just recently, Google’s flagship video sharing site, YouTube, handed over personal information to News Corp’s Fox network in response to a subpoena. Now, a group of media companies are accusing Google of encouraging copyright theft. Maybe these situations aren’t Google’s fault, but it’s not good optics for a company that has control of such a staggering amount of personal data.
Google recently changed its system, so that users who are signed in will receive more personalized results for their searches. This means that future search results can be, at least in part, based on the individual’s past search behaviour. This is a valuable service that I personally subscribe to, but now it will be offered as the “default” search for users who are signed in. Even the folks over at Bruce Clay are a little concerned about a recent patent Google filed to rank content, based on the writer, and not just the content itself.
Do these new options affect your privacy? Probably not, since Google may already have had that data in your account, anyway. But now it may become more apparent to casual users that Google does have that information, or at the very least can have have that information. And people might start to think about the fact that one corporation may be tracking all their searches, queries, interests, and perhaps even website visits, tying it all back to their personal account.
So while nothing, really, has changed recently, there are signs that storms may be brewing on the horizon for Google in the near future. Will the coming debates mean some users move over to the other large search engines? We’ll have to wait and see. But this could get interesting.