• SEO-Blog
  • Startseite
  • RSS-Feed, complete Feed
  • About the Blog, Blogcharts
  • Archive: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• Weitere Postings
  • Looking for beta-testers
  • What the “Befreiphone” reveals about SEO
  • New logo
  • Google's infallible memory
  • Has the zenith of keyword-centered optimization been crossed?
  • Google-datacenter-list
  • Google PageRank-update 09/2008
  • SEOktoberfest
  • Google being confusing: dynamic URLs now better?
  • IndexWatch 09/2008
•  

Don't be evil, Google

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Google's founding. There are enough flashbacks and homages, so I would like to say a few words about how Google's image has changed over the years in my eyes.

To take the linkage of webpages as basis for their ranking was a brilliant idea; this led Google to quickly become the “best” searchengine and led them to be the undisputed brand leader in nearly every western market. A quasi-monopoly, which Microsoft needed decades to reach for the operatingsystem-market, took Google only a few years to attain. Taking into account that after the initial public offering they were committed not only to a hand full of financial backers but to the stock exchange they had to find ways for further growth. This could only be found in other business portfolios.

Google Mail handles the users e-mail correspondence, Google Docs provides a nice online-officesuite and you can use Google Maps/Earth to take a peek at your neighbors garden or plan the next vacation. Those not smart enough for the Google AppEngine can put their pamphlets online thanks to Google Blogger, Google Analytics additionally shows how many users accessed your website from Tibet and if you are near a heart-attack, just feed Google your whole medical information and start wishing for absolution. And just in case you do not offer your information voluntarily, Google will just get them by themselves: thanks to Analytics, AdSense, Doubleclick and further cookie-slingers a large part of the “active” Internet is under control and for the rest we will soon have Google Chrome.

The information that each of those services gather for themselves should already be reason enough to take a closer look at how this information is used. All of this firmly in one hand and either automated of connectable through Google-ID is dangerous. Stepping up to organize all of the Worlds knowledge, lately it is becoming increasingly clear how this should be understood: First gain the knowledge, then order it profit-oriented.