Google as Big Brother


And then there were four:
Why we target Google

Google is one of about four search engines that matter. There are
many more than four engines, but only about four have the technology
to crawl most of the web on a regular basis. Alltheweb (now owned
by Overture) does the best overall crawling, followed by Google and
then Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo). Google's bizarre crawling can be
unfair for large sites with low or average PageRank. They may not get
to many of the pages each month on such sites, even though by the end
of that crawl Google is grabbing pages in spasms, at a rate of
several per second. Then the next month Google's crawlers start all
over again and do the exact same thing.


Of these top three crawlers, Alltheweb has the smallest number of
users in the U.S. Many webmasters wouldn't notice if Alltheweb
disappeared -- despite the fact that they have good technology, both
for crawling and for searching. Hopefully Overture can do something
with Alltheweb and AltaVista (which they also bought in 2003).
While AltaVista has good search technology, their crawling is extremely
poor. Now with both under the same roof, Overture has the assets it
needs to compete.


Yahoo has never done any crawling. Their purchase of Inktomi
makes them potentially competitive as well, and perhaps
by 2004 they may rely less on Google for their results.
Inktomi provides the algorithmic results for MSN, but even so, their
market share is less than one-third of Google's. Microsoft might never be
a competitor because they don't have the technology to crawl or search the
web. They have the money to buy anything, of course, but the last thing
they'd want to buy is something like Google's network, which uses some
15,000 cheap Linux boxes. It is hard to imagine Microsoft's software
scaling reliably to this level, and we don't even count them.


That gives us Google, Yahoo, and Overture. The last one worth
watching is Teoma/AskJeeves. Their search technology is good, and they
have begun to expand their crawl. It remains to be seen how deeply and
consistently they will be able to crawl websites with thousands of pages.


Google is easily top dog. They provide about 75 percent of the
external referrals for most websites. There is no point in putting
up a website apart from Google. It's do or die with Google. If we're
all very lucky, one of the other three will offer some competition
within several years. If we're not lucky, we will be uploading
our websites to Google's servers by then, much like the bloggers
do at blogger.com (which was bought by Google in 2003). It would
mean the end of the web as we know it.


It is worthwhile to understand the pressures that the average,
independent webmaster is under. And given that Google is so
dominant, it's important to understand the pressures that are
being brought to bear on Google, Inc. It does not take too much
imagination to recognize that there's a struggle going on for the
soul of the web, and the focal point of this struggle is Google
itself.


At one level, it's a struggle for advertising revenue. The pundits
look at only this level, and they are unanimous that the only
advertising model on the web with any sort of future is one where
little ads appear after being triggered by keyword searches, or by
the non-ad content of the page. For example, a
search
for Google Watch may show some ads on the right side of the screen
for wrist watches.


While the technique is doesn't work for this example, more often it
serves its purpose. There is only so much pixeled real estate that
the average user can be expected to survey for a given search.
Today up to one-third of each screen is dedicated to paid ads on
Google, as compared to the ad-free results of the original Google.
We programmed our Google proxy in August 2002 and stripped out the
ads because it was easy, but the reason we started the project was
due to privacy issues. If it had merely been a question of ads we
wouldn't have written the proxy program in the first place. Now it's
only seven months later, and we consider the ad stripping to be one
of our proxy's best features. That's how quickly everything has
changed. Today everyone wants a piece of this new wave in web
advertising. Google has become very profitable, and is even having
growing pains.


At another level, it's a struggle over who will have the predominant
influence over the massive amounts of user data that Google
collects. In the past, discussions about privacy issues and the
web have been about consumer protection. That continues to be
of interest, but since 9/11 there is a new threat to privacy
-- the federal government. Google has not shown any inclination to
declare for the rights of its users across the globe, as opposed to
the rights of the spies in Washington who would love to have access
to Google's user data.


Much of the struggle at this new level is unarticulated. For one thing,
the spies in Washington don't talk about it. Congress has given them new
powers, without debating the issues. Google, Inc. itself never comments about
things that matter, and as a private corporation is largely unaccountable.
The struggle recognized by Google Watch has to do with the clash of real
forces, but right now all we can say is that potentially this
struggle could manifest itself in Google's boardroom:





The privacy struggle, which includes both the old issue of consumer
protection and this new issue of government surveillance, means that the
question of how Google treats the data it collects from users becomes
critical. Given that Google is so central to the web, whatever attitude
it takes toward privacy has massive implications for the rest of the web
in general, and for other search engines in particular.


Call it class warfare, if you like. Because that brings up the other
major gripe that Google Watch has with Google. That's the PageRank
problem -- the fact that Google's primary ranking algorithm has less
to do with the quality of web pages, than it has to do with the
"power popularity" of web pages. Their approach to ranking is
anti-democratic, in that already-powerful pages are mathematically
granted extra power to anoint other pages as powerful.


It's not that we believe Google is evil. What we believe is that
Google, Inc. is at a fork in the road, and they have some big decisions
to make. This Google Watch site is trying to articulate, publicize,
and even dramatize the situation at Google, and encourage more
scrutiny of their operations. By doing this, we hope to play a
small part in maintaining the web as an information tool that is
more useful for the masses, than it is for the elites.


That's why we nominated Google for a Big Brother award in 2003. The
nine points we raised in connection with this nomination necessarily
focused on privacy issues. By the time the 2004 nominations are open,
we hope that this list will be shorter rather than longer. But don't
count on it.


1.  
Google's immortal cookie:
Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038.
This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using
persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies
are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because
no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on
your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie
if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your
unique ID number.


2.  
Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address,
the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration.
Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This
is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."


3.  
Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are
able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.


4.  
Google won't say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the
New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google
ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.


5.  
Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security
Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that
they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.


6.  
Google's toolbar is spyware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer
phones home with every page you surf. Yes, it reads your cookie too, and
sends along the last search terms you used in the toolbar. Their privacy
policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action
lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy
failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new
versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the
toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard
disk every time you phone home. Most software vendors, and even Microsoft,
ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google.


7.  
Google's cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright
laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only
way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a
"noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like
the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable
material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages
live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for
webmasters, not "opt-out."


8.  
Google is not your friend:
Young, stupid script kiddies and many bloggers still think Google is "way
kool," so by now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external
referrals to most websites. No webmaster can avoid seeking Google's
approval these days, assuming he wants to increase traffic to his site. If
he tries to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's
semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalized by Google, and his
traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by
Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is
completely unaccountable. Most of the time they don't even answer email
from webmasters.


9.  
Google is a privacy time bomb:
With 150 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google
amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned
data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of
slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.






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