02.25.06
Has power gone to Google’s head?
There is no denying it that Google is the king of Search Engines, although much has changed since its humble beginnings in 1998. Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s vision of a Search Engine that ranks a site in terms of its popularity with link partners proved an overnight success. This ‘concensus’-based value judgement was as democratic as it was revolutionary.
Has anything changed since then? Has this vision and Google’s original mission gone by the wayside? Was the appointment of a former Novell CEO a turning point for a company that was run until then by two brilliant, and perhaps idealistic, young men barely in their thirties?
‘Don’t be Evil’ is the greatest motto for a company that made it big on the strength of its ideas and technologies. Is this code of conduct still adhered to? Is it perhaps interpreted differently now, with a ‘we know best’ claim to infallability?
A lot has been said and written about Google’s ‘blacklists’, the dark dungeons of non-existence for any web site that, at some point or other, broke the rules of engagement -as interpreted by the post-processing algorithms that follow GoogleBot’s benign visits!
If a website is found to have broken any of the ‘rules’ (as expressed in the Webmasters Guidelines), all traces of it can disappear from Google’s index, never to be found again. It seems that once banished, there is no amount of corrective action on the webmaster’s part to restore peace with Google. What’s worse, the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ credo does not stretch to an automatic email being fired off to the offending site pointing out the reasons and the steps required for a return to righteousness!
I remember reading somewhere that Yahoo and MSN have overtaken Google on the sheer number of searches carried out each day. Now, that’s worrying!