Well, Google, the company with the famous tagline “Don’t be Evil” is beginning to show it’s true colors more and more. Like, say, disappearing cryptogon articles from its search results.
Check out the full story at cryptogon.
Also, see commentary at Pop Occulture.
Nevermind the whole thing about attacking paid links: they are trying to, in effect, say that we do not own our websites or what we write on them and that if we write things that don’t fit their business model, we get punished by them attacking our ability to make money off our work.
This is not sustainable business practice, and I’m tempted to use stronger words to describe it. But we all should have saw this coming a long way off with their collusion with the Chinese government, etc.
How long until this comment gets filtered out of search results? If you can use FireFox plugins to block ads on a web page, there’s conceiveably no reason why you couldn’t simply clip pieces of content out of a web page before serving them to the browser as well… Especially if you’re Google and you have your feelers up inside the browser too.
I’m surprised, honestly, that people aren’t going more nuts abot this stuff.
One other thing: with the Google paid link “scandal” that’s just beginning to blossom, I think it’s absurd that so many website owners are just kowtowing to Google, dumping their paid links and begging to be reinstated. They clearly don’t see how they are abdicating their power to the company, when they could be banding together to create a search and ranking system which could eventually surpass Google, and protect and promote the lot of them and their business practices as a shared value community.
/end rant.
Agreed. The cave-in sounds like something out of Grapes of Wrath. We should be looking to create our own avenues and markets not waiting on Google to take care of things for us.
Meet the new Googlement, same as the old government…but only if we haven’t learned anything.
[...] want to stop using Google for this. I don’t trust them to share the best and most relevant of my own data results with my site’s visitors, and [...]