The-dark-side-of-google

There is a new novelty site out there called the dark side of Google, a search engine page which features white text on black background, that graphically reverses the look of the regular Google website. While this makes for a refreshing graphic change of pace, others have been led to thinking about the darker aspects of certain of Google's practices. What about the real dark side of the famous search engine?

(source:deskofbrian.com)

A lot of search engine users, and certainly webmasters and Internet marketers, have had a love-hate history with the online giant Google. It looms over the landscape as not only the market leader in providing Web search services, but in shaping "the rules" for guidelines for how online interactivity and business related to searching is performed, and how sites are ranked or de- ranked in their search position. While the company motto is "don't be evil," many continue to experience a dark side to the Corporation and its own business model. 

Optimization conundrum

The first thing many note about Google's monopoly presence in cyberspace is while it built its domination on being a true search engine that gave all sides and equal playing field in getting noticed, instead of being a glorified selective directory like the old Webcrawler or original Yahoo, over time has become quite obvious it is making choices for the market in what website it will actually showcase in the first pages of the search results. Many website creators are baffled by all the changes Google makes to (as it claims) de-rank "spamming" websites, since the revisions to its algorithm often seem to end up frustrating sites providing legitimate content.

The result is very often an unjustified low placement of sites with relevant content in their ranking system. In a recent article called "Online insignificance: buried on Google search page 23," Web health writer Bill Sardi openly suspects that googles motives are not all nobly focused on "improving the user experience"as it asserts. "Yes, Google's new algorithm eliminated 12% of all online searches (leading to) content farms," Sardi writes. "But I don't trust Google either. It has secret components of its algorithm which I'm sure involve profitability, that is, ranks the sites that generate the most income, not the best content, for Google."

PPC blues

Many aspects of the company's operations are rhetorically painted one way, but seem to bottom line out another way, including its pay per click service (PPC), also known as AdWords. Some "dark side" advocates believe Google is making SEO more difficult for smaller companies and sites to build Web traffic from for free, in order to attract them into using its pay per click services instead. But once enrolled in their program, your website largely becomes under the search engine's de facto control, with its format and content monitored in order to see if it meets continually evolving "quality score" standards needed to be a host for its PPC program.

This practically leads to marketers paying money out to Google, while having to make their sites SEO compliant anyway. This can be doubly frustrating, according to Internet marketer Dan White, because "yes, you can make money online with consistent effort, but you can also lose a serious amount of cash with bidding on non efficient keywords or by not keeping track of what goes on." Complying with Google's wish to have webmasters use both PPC and SEO leads to webmasters having to learn two different skill sets, that sometimes conflict with one another.

Privacy, schmivacy

Google also hasn't fared well, reputation wise, with maintaining the privacy of user searches, and in ensuring full access to websites of whatever stripe. The standard cookie Google places on a user's PC, for example, is set to last until 2038, a time frame that seems much too long. Considering the company has moved towards adding an abundance of services under a unified global "Google account," and has strongly urged real names be used instead of nicknames (as was frequently the case with youtube), the bundling trend seems definitely headed towards systematically tracking someone searches for marketing purposes.

The darkness of Google's privacy tactics extend to permitting certain governments to use the site for data mining of user searches across the world. The company has made known that different countries routinely "ask" or demand such data on a frequent basis, but it claims to have abided by its own "don't be evil" motto in turn down most requests. Those who are unnerved by this prospect are encouraged to try other search engines powered by Google, but which use devices that hide the IP address of the user, such as Startpage. Otherwise, expect your Google search information to be put on a conveyor belt, headed straight to the NSA.

Big Brother, Little Brother

Finally, other actions by the company indicate the search engine is compliant surrogate of big government and big business, in plain sight. Most recently, Google sent shock waves across the nutritional supplement industry, and Internet marketers for the same when it announced it was complying with FDA requests to disable full AdWords accounts companies promoting supplements offering "detox" or "chelation" products. This action, and the FDA request came without supplying notice to the affected businesses. As in, no legal process, no redress - Google just flicks a switch, and shuts down a promotion campaign a company already paid them for!

When an online gatekeeper can exercise such raw power to suddenly disrupt an entire industry, it might just be evil. Until the dark side of Google can be "turned," Jedi style, to something better, users and webmasters are best advised to at least complement its use with other methods to search for the web and to promote their sites.