The more and more I look at what Google is doing lately, the more they remind of Microsoft. Their insidious actions are actually pretty scary. Lets look at the latest toolbar.
If you install the newest Google toolbar for IE (link) it has a new “feature” called automap which will automatically rewrite any address on a webpage to link to Google maps. You may say hey that’s great what’s wrong with it? Well first of all it’s my webpage if I wanted it to link to a map I would have done so. Once they’ve built up a critical mass of viewers for Google maps, how long do you think it will be before advertising appears? So Google will have rewritten my webpage to link to their website, with advertising they will get revenue from. You seeing a pattern yet? Are you naive enough to think nah, they’ll never commercialize it? Well that’s what they said about the regular search results, not to long ago. How long do you think it will be before they start linking out using other terms on the pages? Hey Google it’s my damn webpage keep your stinking links off it.
Want another example? Some of the folks at threadwatch started talking about building a link analyzing tool (post). Discussion started and ideas were being tossed about then a Google representative came along and made the following comment:
I would ask that it not scrape Google. Doing so is clearly outside Google’s guidelines: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality
(the part about software querying Google)
It’s also a load on our servers from bots rather than the people for whom our services are intended. In addition to being rude and using our services without permission, it may well open you up liability. Again, this is just a courtesy heads-up that such software would violate our guidelines. Please consider this a polite request not to produce software that scrapes Google without our permission.
A mere 24 hours later after this thinly veiled threat and strong arm tactic was used, the project has been put on hold (Link development tool put on ice). So lets get this straight, Google sends out spiders and bots to our webpages, caches our content to build their index and then generates revenue from it. However we aren’t allowed to send bots to Googles website to do the same? Seems like Google is more interested in a parasitic relationship than a symbiotic one.
Need another example? Did you know many of Googles programs are built using open source tools? For you kids in the back of the class that means free. So Google built a huge billion dollar company based on free software, saved millions of dollars and gave nothing back (see Google we take it all and give nothing back). Detecting a pattern yet?
We’re Google, we take what we want and do what we want with it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us because we have all the traffic.
Any other ideas you want to try to antagonize the search community with? If you’re going to operate with corporate greed as goal, at least have the nerve to stand up and say so, and stop hiding behind the “do no evil” slogon, because it’s wearing a little thin, and quite frankly I don’t like being lied to.