just-vicky

I found a really well written article about Google courtesy of The Guardian (you can view it at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/17/googlethemedia.google).  The article really got me thinking, it’s odd I’ve posted news items about issues raised in the article including online privacy and Google bias but never really given any serious thought to using a different search engine. 

I think this is partly because working in SEO / SEM ignoring Google rankings is as close as you can get to website suicide and partly because the thought never crossed my mind it’s just what I use, I log on to the internet and depending on what region I’m targeting for my website I go to that countries version of Google, of course I consider other search engines like Yahoo and MSN when optimizing but Google is first choice.  I guess it’s  a phenomena kind of like muscle memory, you do something often enough it becomes natural, second nature even, you don’t need to think about it you just do it.

The chances are you do the same but ask yourself this, are we giving Google too much power? 

One paragraph in the article states:

“Google's tentacles are everywhere. It runs services for blogging, email, instant messaging, shopping and social networking. It offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and other tools to rival Microsoft's products in the workplace. It is building a software platform for mobile phones that may challenge Apple's iPhone and others. It has just launched Knol, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia to take on Wikipedia. In America, Google Health enables users to maintain their own medical records. The company is also working on language translation, speech recognition and video search. Brin and Page even have their eyes on space: they have offered a $20m prize to anyone who can make a privately financed spacecraft able to land on the moon.”

Should a search engine company be involved in landing spacecrafts on the moon?  Is there anything wrong with them wanting to be involved in space?  I’m all for innovation but having medical records online does worry me, you’re essentially providing Google with a lot of very personal information about yourself which they could use to target ads to you about drugs and even alternative therapies, I’m not convinced that’s such a great idea.

Anyhow, I digress, believe it or not I don’t have an issue with Google I just believe it’s time we started defining what is and isn’t acceptable and how far we are prepared to let Google (and other search engines) into our lives which is why I’ve decided to vote with my feet, for work purposes for the time being I will have to continue considering my sites placement in Google and optimizing for that but for my own personal use I will be using another search engine.  How about you?  Will you be voting with your feet?