Tad Chef, aka SEO 2.0, wrote an interesting piece on the Collective Thoughts blog about why you shouldn't trust Google. Among his reasons:
- Google supports and implements censorship measures in nondemocratic countries like China
- Google owns one of the biggest US SEO companies, now isn’t that a conflict of interest?
- Google will disclose your private data or IP to identify you even to authorities of non-democratic countries or in cases where people are guilty of free speech
Another nine reasons are listed that range from Google utilizing students to manually clean up search results to using the same rhetoric as the Bush administration ("we're not evil").
Obviously he's a big Google skeptic. On Sphinn, numerous individuals have cheered for the post but others, like Jason Falls, found trouble with it. His argument is that the post was controversial linkbait that attempted to drive traffic to the the blog post.
But the bottom line is that Google is under a microscope because of its big presence. As one user on Sphinn says, "People never like monopolies and the same applies to Google."
Danny Sullivan takes every item and compares them to other search engines in his comment on Sphinn. Compared to Yahoo and MSN, Google doesn't seem half bad. It's the nature of business, I suppose.
Do you trust the big G? Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
