No Joke: Has Google Embraced the Dark Side?
April 1, 2012
Do you remember the cheery logo? Now Google uses a black bar at the top of the page to provide one click access to such services as Play and +You.
In the good old days, Google allegedly defined its guiding principles in a simple three-word statement: Don’t be evil.
That was in 2001. Now it appears that the search giant has removed the “don’t” from that sentence. That’s the verdict of Mat Honan, in his piece entitled The Case Against Google.
Honan says that the iconic firm wants to be a one-stop shop for users’ information needs, even providing answers to such subjective questions as “where is the best sushi restaurant in Chicago?” In order to accomplish that, it’s forcing people to use Google+ and other apps that it has direct control over.
One passage which caught my attention was:
Google may not be a utility, but search is a very utility-like service. Search is what Google was built on, and why people go to Google in the first place. And when Google rolled out its newest iteration of search—Search Plus your World (SPYW)—people reacted to it like viewing an open grave. There’s a good reason for that revulsion: SPYW is a mess. In trying to deliver personalized results, Google polluted the page with its own inferior products (like Google+ instead of Twitter,Google Places instead of Yelp) while banishing competitors to lower listings in the results. Ads are everywhere. The People and Pages sidebar that now appears in search results is particularly galling. It is the ultimate subversion of Google to a commercial end. Basically, it’s an enormous ad for Google’s other products, hogging your screen. It’s hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there’s a remarkably simple explanation: Search is no longer Google’s core product.
Several observations:
- Is Google dramatically different from the company it was in 2007? My view is, “No.” The Google of today was mostly in position by 2006. After that date, the company’s motion followed a groove like the lane at a bowling alley.
- Recently “real” journalists have been looking at Google in the context of iTunes, Facebook pages, or Amazon recommendations. As a result, Google’s activities are different because of the observer’s perspective. Perhaps these critical discussions of Google tell more about the authors’ perceptions than Google itself?
- Lamenting the “end of search” or any other apocalyptic scenarios strikes me a little excessive. Google is a service which costs most users nothing. In exchange for “free,” Google has to monetize in order to stay in business. Getting excited about what Google does well, doesn’t do at all, or does poorly is part of the game.
I do agree that search for Web content is different from what it was in 1993. However, systems which respond to clicks become different because of user behavior. So, look in the mirror. That’s the person responsible for the changes at Google. Algorithms. Remember?
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2012
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