When John Young heard a radio interviewer ask whether a song was pastiche, he didn’t grab a dictionary. He typed an approximation into Google to get the word’s spelling and meaning.
When Young, a design consultant in Whittier, California, gets new clients, he ”googles” them to see if they pay their bills. And he likes that Google’s sponsored links, paid for by advertisers, are inconspicuously placed to the side on results pages.
With a gigantic index of nearly 4,3-billion web pages and counting, Google has become the internet’s top search engine.
Credit good technology, but perhaps as important, Google’s Philosophy number six: ”You can make money without doing evil.”
But in this age of corporate malfeasance and cutthroat consolidation, is that just wishful thinking? Can Google, on the verge of an expected public offering, still be trusted? Loyal users seem to think so.
For Ted Kaczmarek, a senior network engineer in Jersey City, New Jersey, the quality of the search results proves Google isn’t influenced by the bottom line.
”A lot of times, I see some of the most obscure stuff come up number one,” he said. ”I know those people aren’t paying any money because they haven’t got any money.”
That is not to say there haven’t been complaints about the five-year-old search engine, which comScore Media Metrix credits for three-quarters of US searches in December, about half at google.com and the rest through partners that tap Google’s index.
The likelihood that Google will go public and sell stock has generated rumblings that shareholder considerations might trump those of Google users.
And already, advocacy groups have complained about Google’s policy of rejecting critical ads alongside regular search results.
Recently, Google banned an environmental group’s ads that protested a cruise line’s sewage treatment methods.
Some merchants also complain that sudden changes in Google’s ranking formula can wipe them off the internet. They suspect pressure to buy ads, though Google says its changes help thwart tricks websites use to artificially boost listings.
Google’s formula, for the most part, remains top secret, and Google co-founder Larry Page acknowledges that the company could do better in spelling out guidelines on advertising and censorship.
”We’re quite a young company, growing really fast and dealing with real global issues,” Page said. ”Sometimes it takes time to understand the issues.”
In the meantime, ”secrecy always feeds the imagination and gives people the freedom to think whatever the wildest thing they can conjure up is,” said Frank Hayson, editor of a website named Watching Google Like A Hawk.
Doug Cutting, lead developer of an open-source alternative called Nutch that seeks to better explain decisions behind its search results, said people may trust Google today, ”but should we have to trust them forever just blindly?”
A play on the number Googol — 1 followed by 100 zeros — Google was born on September 7, 1998, in a garage in Menlo Park, California. Through word of mouth among the tech elite, its search engine soon toppled powerhouses at the time, including Yahoo and AltaVista.
The secret sauce: A ranking system that equates relevancy with popularity. Google believes sites are more likely to link to other sites they find useful, so a site scores higher the more links it has to it. The result is greater relevancy than using keywords alone.
Because Google finds websites and scores them using automated software tools, it can index millions more sites than human-powered search directories, which once were considered the best.
Over time, Google became even more influential as it licensed its technology to supplement searches at Yahoo and America Online. (Yahoo ended the relationship last month and, like Microsoft is aggressively developing rival technology.)
But Google as the market leader also draws the brunt of complaints, even those that apply to rivals, too. And that has led to some calls, though none serious or strong, for regulation or oversight.
”We have all sorts of protections against government abuse, … but figuring out what to do when you have a private party wielding a lot of power is a puzzle,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor.
Although some have compared Google to an electric company, which is generally regulated to ensure that moneymaking concerns don’t hurt the public interest, Google see itself more as an information provider.
Defending a federal lawsuit over changes in Google’s ranking system, Google argued that its results are merely opinions. A judge agreed, saying the company deserved First Amendment protection.
In an interview, Page said Google shared values that most journalists hold: providing ”really good, trustworthy, objective, unbiased information.”
Nonetheless, some critics have suggested that a mechanism be created for appealing decisions on ranking. A public forum, they say, could help hash out policy issues. Perhaps Google could use a public liaison like ombudsmen found at many news organisations?
Zittrain said Google has moved toward more openness, citing its decision to publicise cases where organisations and companies, alleging copyright violation, pressure Google to remove links to critical sites.
By law, Google must remove the links or lose immunity from lawsuits, but now it also discloses specific cases through an independent site, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
Google has yet to do that for sites removed under pressure from France and Germany, which have strict laws banning hate speech.
Page said the company still was exploring the legality of doing so.
Nancy Blachman, an author of Google tutorials and the wife of a Google software engineer, said Google doesn’t add features lightly, holding ”a lot of discussions about the ramifications” of each one.
Even the ads, Blachman said, favour users. Ads are ranked not just based on payments, but on the number of clicks they get, so unpopular ads can get dropped even if their sponsors are willing to pay more.
Experts believe the market will ultimately keep Google honest, and even with shareholders to answer to, its executives should recognise that trust is a key asset.
”If Google did something that would be bad for users, people would find out about it very quickly,” said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. ”That would hurt their brand.” – Sapa-AP