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(Google) The view from outside Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA. |
With over 4 billion indexed and meticulously sorted web files, images and messages dating back to the 1980's, Google, a four and a half year old California-based company, has indisputably become the world's largest information powerhouse. Wielding a mixture of superior technology and purposeful business marketing, the once university student project utterly transformed the perception of Internet searching and triggered never before seen ensuing ramifications.
Today, Google answers over 6 billion queries a month, scouring gargantuan piles of data. Its ability to return highly relevant results within fractions of a second has turned the company's services into an indispensable tool for millions of users across the world.
Smashing challenges with enviable ease, Google's path to success was littered with dramatically increasing interest in its technology from both ordinary people and major corporate players. Adroitly employing the immense resources of the Internet and the skyrocketing media interest, Google sealed crucial deals with popular Internet destinations, ranging from Amazon.com and The Washington Post to AOL and Yahoo!
At the same time, these and other business relationships allotted Google an all-out hegemony over the Internet search niche, providing services to three of the four top search engines -- a market share of more than 80 percent, according to some estimates.
Might and responsibility
Since its inception in 1998, and especially in recent months, Google's services have been widely seen as impeccable. From an end user's standpoint, they provide everything anyone has ever craved for -- a far-flung index of web pages, instant, relevant results with little or no advertising at all. According to Google itself, the company's fundamental technology, PageRank™ -- a system exploring web pages' linkages to assess the relevance of certain content -- underlies the democratic spirit of the Internet. But the scope of Google's power is raising valid concerns over its authority to store, manage and provide highly-customizable access to gigantic amounts of information.
Surely, Google deserves recognition for the technological innovations and apt business models it introduced to the world. Today, amid the tough economic climate in Silicon Valley, the company's stirring Googleplex seems oddly reminiscent of the booming dot-com era just three or four years ago.
Empowered by its astounding success, Google is now exploring other fields of interest -- news sites, blogging, targeted advertising and more. But why is an Internet search company tempted by such services?
There is no univocal answer. Seeing itself as a well-oiled and smoothly advancing machine, Google clearly needed to expand and invest into other realms. At the same time, a multitude of analysts questioning Google's motives termed the company's launch of its automated news service and the recent acquisition of Pyra Labs, the largest provider of blogger services, part of a wider strategy to gather global intelligence for unknown purposes, but with potentially ominous consequences.
No matter what the motives are, under the resourceful leadership of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two Stanford graduates who devised Google's breakthrough technology, the company has turned into a full-blown monopoly. A unique monopoly driven by user satisfaction and lack of interest in other solutions.
But where is the fine line between Google's utility and its overly hegemonic power?
Every four weeks Google visits all 3 billion web pages indexed in its database preserving openly accessible cached copies of their contents. Providing access to this data is not entirely legal since, in most cases, it represents unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material. Using specific meta tags, Google offers web site owners the option to cease the caching of their web sites. Nevertheless, from a legal standpoint, the lack of interdiction does not necessarily mean consent.
Secondly, Google's caching technique does not allow the instant removal of already copied content from the search engine's database. Due to Google's powerful technology sensitive information can easily be extracted from the web. For example, after the September 11th attacks in the United States, the U.S. government pulled out potentially disastrous data about nuclear power plants in the country, but cached copies of the pages remained in Google's massive archive for weeks and even months.
On another front, some civil liberties groups have expressed concern about the search engine's information handling practices. Google's
privacy policy is conspicuously cursory and vague -- truly inadequate for one of the most popular Internet destinations. The company's statement is inexplicit on key issues, including data retention practices, and lacks any certification, often acquired by top-notch web sites.
How does Google handle user information? Collected data is widely used to measure and improve the effectiveness of search results, but growing evidence shows that the California-based dot-com company preserves nonessential information for keeps. Given the size, the amounts of retained user-specific information and the highly-efficient technology, without the appropriate commitments, Google can easily be utilized as a powerful intelligence tool
Google's sheer popularity, however, has turned the search engine into the largest web site promotion service on the World Wide Web. As Google.com and its partner sites become primary destinations for regular Internet users, site owners become increasingly dependent on Google's search results to attract web audience. Yet, the company's excessive powers can be both your best friend and your worst enemy.
Stashing away the corporate propaganda, the PageRank™ algorithm has proved not as democratic and fair as it is purported to be. As a result, Google has been engaged in a multitude of lawsuits from companies feeling unjustly treated. Unlike popular brand names like Microsoft and Amazon.com, small and medium-sized businesses draw most of their web sites' visitors from search engines. This disproportioned dependency could backfire into pernicious collapse of customer influx.
On top of that, Google has indicated it is ready to make compromises with its principles in pursuit of company interests. Google reportedly meddled with its technology's democratic spirit to filter out results served to Chinese Internet users. The move was in response to a ban of the search engine by the communist government of mainland China for providing access to content deemed illegal in the country. Meanwhile, in February this year, Google delisted a web site from its index after a protest from the U.K. newspaper Chester Chronicle, complaining of a "sick humor" site, despite the fact it did not violate any U.S. or British laws.
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(Google) The masterminds of Google's breakthrough technology: Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin (right)
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What Google should do...
Having in mind Google's far-reaching effects, the company is in need of self-imposed rules rather than efforts to deal with situations on a case-by-case basis.
Google must improve its user privacy practices. The company should not track and gather information about users' search habits without their explicit consent. In addition, Google should also acquire appropriate certification of its privacy statement by a third-party, which would independently and objectively assess the search engine's data retention procedures.
In order to corroborate its thesis for Internet democracy, Google should establish an internal committee with specific, publicly available rules and agenda, to deal with complaints about certain web pages in the company's index.
Google should provide web site owners with the ability to instantly remove web pages from the company's archive.
Google should require the presence of a specific meta tag on web pages to provide free access to cached copies in its archive. The inclusion of such tags is easily done on part of web site owners, while at the same time preserves the legality of Google's actions.
Finally, there is an urgent need of competition to Google's monopoly. To reflect the true democratic principles of the Internet, the world needs other top-notch solutions in the search engine market. Just recently, Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, announced it is eyeing Google's success and is interested in making substantial investments in competing solutions.
No matter how events unfold, Google's absolute market domination deserves both recognition and an expectation for responsibility. As a leading figure, the search giant has to take the center role in developing mechanisms to prove and sustain its objectivity and technological superiority. Google is no longer an innovative student project, but an exemplary tool so powerful it will eventually require control to work for a mutual benefit.
