Google, every bodies best friend. It’s faltering mission to provide search results seems to be a thing of the past, more and more these days they seem to be optimising their search engine simply to provide a better basis for their adverts. One can understand this, given the revenue it provides, but why they keep on insisting that they advocate things like net neutrality, and try to maintain such a friendly image is beyond me. I can’t believe that most people don’t see Google for what they are: a money making behemoth, rather then your best friend.
One problem that plagues the internet is the sheer volume of webpages, and naturally we need a filter if we are ever to gain any useful information from using what is arguably the best resource available to man. The danger however appears when one begins to rely on a single outlet. When writing an essay, thesis or just looking for an article, you would not reference a single book. Why would you reference one search engine? It is easy to say that Google provides access to several pieces of information, but the problem – one I doubt many people realise – is that they provide you with what they determine, using vastly complicated algorithms, you want to see.
And this is where the lie comes in. Net neutrality is a contentious issue, there are arguments both for and against. But it is important to realise that Google is not net neutral. To be fair, it isn’t the only search engine that falls into this category, but Google is the one that grates most, given it’s approach to how it serves you, it’s friend. As we know, Googles main purpose is to make money, their trick to doing so is targeting adverts at you based on your search results.
This is all well and good for people that are happy to let Google do this – happy to keep their heads buried in the sand and allow Googles advertising algorithms serve you what they want you to see, based on what people have paid to have their sites served.
Google had always maintained that any data collection would be opt-in. This is now no longer the case. The implications are staggering, but the worry is that this will fly over the heads of a huge percentage of internet users. This should be a huge wake up call to everyone that uses Google, but I rather fear it won’t be. At it’s simplest level, it means every single computer in the world that uses Google for searching will be tracked, and the information stored for their marketing purposes.
Quite how Google can get away with this I don’t know. It rewrites one of the basic tenants of privacy law, changing opt-in to opt-out. And if Google can get away with it, it sets the worrying precedent that anyone can. Try turning off automatic acceptance of cookies in your browser, and seeing just how many requests you get to allow Google cookies in an average days use. It’s staggering. They really are everywhere.
At the end of the day though, the worry is that people will no longer be able to get simply the best results from a search. The whole beauty of the internet is that there is such variety – if our search results are being screened and then future search results based on this, we are losing the beauty of truly searching, we are merely reiterating through old searches.
The simplest answer is to not use Google, there are after all many search engines out there,Microsoft’s Bing being one to have gained market share recently, but that doesn’t solve the problem. If Google are allowed to get away with this, it changes the whole stance on privacy on the internet, and potentially elsewhere. The problem being that no one stands up to Google the way they stood up to Microsoft, or Intel – e.g. in the Windows/IE debacle and the Intel price fixing &anti-competition fiasco – because of the way Google markets itself.
It needs to change, Google need to be reigned in. Google must be stopped.
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