Is Google Doing Evil?

[janeth]

There talking about this

http://www.google.com/googleblog/200...h-firefox.html

Phil C

Here is what Phil C had to say about it.

Some people have voiced concerns that Google wants to control/take over the Web. Until now, I have written that particular idea off as being rather far-fetched. But, for me, this latest innovation is a step too far.

They may or may not want to control the Web, but this latest interference with websites (log files), together with the recent AutoLink interference with webpages, shows that they have no regard whatsoever for other people's property and sites, and that they consider the entire web is there for them to do whatever they want with. They have no qualms about it, and I would say that they have no scruples either.

They don't give a damn that website owners rely on statistics from the logfiles - it's not like they don't know, and they don't give a damn that most of us want our webpages to display as we designed them and not as Google thinks they should be displayed. In fact they don't give a damn about anyone else's property. They ride roughshod over it all, and treat it as their playground.

With their cache system, which acquires images from the cached website, they have stolen from the pockets of website owners from the beginning (cost of the bandwidth for those images). They don't care.

They have managed to get one or more programmes running in millions of our computers (toolbar, desktop search), and today I read in this forum that one of their employees works full-time on the Firefox browser, which they are busy promoting, of course. More ways to interfere with the rest of the world coming from that direction?

Frankly, it's all beginning to look quite sinister and alarming to me. They are busy pushing their programmes into our machines, and at the same time, they show that they are willing to do whatever they like with whatever they want, and without giving a second thought for the rights of anyone else.

Isn't it time for the web community to undo what we did some years ago? We were the ones who made Google popular, by spreading the word. Isn't it time to try and stop them? Heck, AutoLink on its own should inspire us all to do everything we can to stop them. The web community told them of our concerns about it - we even suggested a way to make us happy without them ditching it, and it didn't change a damn thing. This new logfile interference should inspire us even more. We should not let these things go by or they will just keep abusing the web, and us, more and more.

It seems that Google is doing more and more to make people mad. The Autolink upset a lot of people and they went ahead with it.

What are your thoughts about this new Enhanced Searching Feature?

Is Google going to far?

[jestep]

I don't disagree with anything that Phil C had to say about it.

My question is that, is google beyond the point of being controlled? They are such a big unstoppable Juggernaut, and more and more every day they loose faith from the people who make the websites that their business feeds off of.

The other problem is that google brings a lot of good traffic. They know this, and webmasters know this. The people who could stop google are the ones who rely on them, so in reality there is no stopping them.

[janeth]

I agree, the only ones that have a chance at stopping them are Yahoo and MSN.

They seem to do a lot of stuff and not care about who they hurt or who it cost money.

But there is no way we could stop them.

[DMC_34]

Originally Posted by janeth

But there is no way we could stop them.

Sure there is, exclude Googlebot. If everybody did it, index becomes depleted, Google users go elsewhere. Obviously though, this would hurt our sales and therefore not a viable option.