Google is evil. Here’s the picture.
by Randall McCarley
December 17th, 2007
One man… you go high enough you always come to one man… who? - Mel Gibson as Porter in Payback
I know it’s really hard for some people to grasp that Google is an evil, lying, manipulative company (with fantastic PR). So I drew a picture.
How many times have you heard Google representatives say that Search and Adwords are kept separate? This just can’t be because these people run the whole thing. From Search to Maps to Blogger to Adsense and so much more. At some point, all these “divisions” become one company with a single leader pointing the way.
For those of you unfamiliar with leadership principles, the way a chain of command works is communication runs up and commands go down. The employees don’t see the grand design or understand it. They just do their jobs by following orders and reporting progress.
But someone at Google knows both sides of the company very well and pulls the strings to make them do what he wants. Would Google put an evil mastermind in it’s top management team?
How does this relate to you as an SEO or business owner? Google controls two of the most powerful mechanisms to push traffic to your websites. The first is their “altruistic” search engine that’s become a verb. The second is the pay-to-play text ads. Now if you were running Google and you wanted people to pay for your ads, what would you do?
Would you tell the search team to do whatever it can to block website owners from ranking well in the free organics when they show a budget that could be applied to the paid ads? Would you tell them to penalize sites that sell text ads with dropped PR scores? How far would you go to make the ROI on normal ad purchases appear risky and not as effective as your pay product?
UPDATE: Check out this lengthy post on the history of Google’s dominance and how they are using their influence to push out smaller competitors in both the commercial and non-profit areas. Maybe I’m paranoid but how would you feel if Google announced they were entering your market?
Next Article: Microsoft Search Broken? Previous Article: Microsoft: Better to ask forgiveness than permission philosophy makes its way to Live
December 18th, 2007 at 10:31 am
The question is whether or not such crass capitalism is evil. Google themselves may not be evil since that phrase would encompass all of the employees, including the worker bees. However, to answer that question you posed about an evil mastermind in the top management team I would consider it to be someone with a strong background in marketing and finance who knows how to tie the 2 together in a self feeding symbiosis.
That’s the goal is it not? Create a system that feeds on itself and pays for itself 2 fold! No loss, just gain.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Capitalism only works if there is competition. With Google entering all the different markets they are crushing innovation. This is allowed because people are just accepting Google is not evil. If you don’t think Google is evil, I’m ok with that. But would you change your mind if Google decided to launch a service in your niche?
December 21st, 2007 at 8:05 am
This is definitely something to worry about, I agree with you that it’s not healthy if a company owns and wants to own everything there is to own. I’m not sure if evil would be the best word to describe it though, I think it’s more about greed…
Very informative articles. I have added your site to my wordpress directory…hope you don’t mind. I try to keep track of quality sites this way.
Regards.
December 22nd, 2007 at 3:08 am
Thanks fontadoni - that’s very kind. When it comes to greed, a small amount is healthy, too much decays the moral center and encourages evil acts.
December 27th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Hey Randall,
I agree entirely that Google sucks, and this is another interesting argument in the debate. The fact they have all our data is another freakish thing.
Cheers,
Gab
January 4th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Just for curiosity, pick your website from a link to Flickr, then to Gevil.org.. and then to you. 14thc.com.
I must admit, this is the kind of article that i like to read.
I have been following Googles services for a long time and of course, started to begin cetic about what the mind behind it all this.
Hey, does anyone recommends a good bookmark software manager?
And a web virtual drive? (i just read that Google is developing a virtual drive powerful enough to keep all your files in their disks..
January 4th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Geraldo if you are looking for automated online backup and storage I highly recommend FileSafe Backup.
As for bookmarks I tend toward sphinn for net-centric stuff and digg for the rest.