Google good...?

This is a kind of interesting article on The Register, The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?

In a way you need to know some of the history. I'm hardly qualified to provide this, but what I understand is that Google were originally a smart couple of guys who developed a radically improved way of searching the web as a research project. They put their service online and it gained huge popularity. They also had another brainwave: to fund their service through tageted advertisements based on your search and the results. Google has now become very rich, and has developed a whole range of other innovative services along the way. The article picks up on this history and talks about some of the problems that beset the search engine now - and why Google might be happy about this.

Another important part of the story is that Google made lots of very principled ethical statements about their company, their services, and the way they worked. In many ways they appeared the ethical opposite of Microsoft just at the time when people were beginning to recognise the depths of the problems with Microsoft and its monopolistic practices and shoddy goods (and realising that we'd been quite successfully conned into believing that MS software was still high quality).

Google was going to bring a new democracy to the net, a democracy perhaps better than any of our governments provided because it would be a true people's democracy. There's something worrying me about this idea, although I wish there wasn't. Anyway this democratic vision has been challenged on a number of fronts: the scanning of people's computers and their emails to generate targeted ads on their webpages and emails; the censorship thing in China; the dispute with the previous owners of Gmail.co.uk, and I'm sure there are more examples. There are some people who claim that Google is just turning into another big bad bully, trying to out-microsoft Microsoft. The link above touches on some of these issues too.

It also seems to me, and I don't know if I read this somewhere or inferred it, that the top results in Google searches are self-sustaining. We search for something, usually just try the top few sites, and then put links on to what we've found. The more links to a site the better its rating in Google, the higher the site is the more likely you are to create a link to it. This potentially stifles creativity and innovation because the smaller and less well-know sites are less likely to be highly rated.

Getting back on to the more positive, I do think the apparently person focused approach of Google is interesting. Most people say its a great place to work - lots of freedom and creativity and different ways of working (although I bet they still work ridiculously long hours). People used to think Microsoft did this, with all their plush offices and employee benefits, but some high profile desertions to Google suggest they're winning on this front too.

Another people-focused approach of Google is to support voluntary open source projects, both financially and in their wider working practices (although not as much as they should, and I believe they still retain trade secrets, patents and copyrights - and defend them).

One people-focused thing that most observers leave out of discussions about individual companies or services though, is that although access to computers and the internet is growing, there are still huge numbers of people who are simply excluded from participating in net culture or benefitting from web-based services. And many of the people who do have web access lack basic knowledge to enable them to navigate and use it effectively). I think any company worth its ethics must take responsibility for this too.

At the moment, while many people are benefitting positively from Google, it is still getting inexorably caught up in the cash trap. There is now so much money invested in Google, not just the giant company itself but all the other companies and individuals that syndicate their services like search boxes, and also all the advertisers ploughing revenues into the system, not to mention all the organisations for whom Google falls somehow into their business plans. This is why Google is silting up, and why it likes the mud.

This is just a microcosm of the current economic situation though. Everything seems to be getting silted up with bureaucracy and business plans and cash. I'm not sure if I'd choose the word democratic (although it's not a bad word), but if we are to try to go in this direction we need to recognise that this cash trap we're getting ourselves into is really damaging society, not to mention the environment, and freedom and democracy require breaking out of the trap.

This can't be done quickly. Like it or not, Google is trapped in the current economic system, and we don't want it to suddenly become so principled that it cancells all its advertising and goes bust. They really do seem to need to put their ethics where their search engine is and ensure that their results focus on high quality and relevance rather than advertising potential, and they really need to respond more directly to the problem of all the people who can't access computers effectively today. Then when they've made some progress against these hurdles they should look at the wider issues.

Of course this blog is powered by Google. I constantly use Google services at the moment (although I need them to support Linux more). I'd be interested to hear about more ethical alternatives (in fact various competitor blogs are good examples, and I will swap over sometime, but I'm stuck here for a bit now I've just started). I'm even listed quite high in Google searches despite the fact that my sites are so small and new and obscure.

Finally, I was delighted to find out today that if you search for "incorporeal transformations" deleuze on Google Canada, this blog is the top result!

Thank you Google, I love you
;-)