Before we get to the question of whether Google is evil, we have to decide what “evil” means. We all know that Google is not evil in the sense of being a group of axe murderers. But we may have doubts about whether their business practices are fair and honest. Then, we have to ask, as long as we are getting what we want from Google, do we care whether their business practices are fair and honest?
I recently complained that Google has instituted a requirement that new users of Gmail also sign up for Google+. I was mostly upset with this because my experience with G+ was not great, and I received spam from G+ after deleting my G+ account. But in looking at this now, I do not see Google’s policy as unfair or dishonest. Basically, they are saying that instead of signing up for just Gmail now, you sign up for Google itself … maybe it should have even been that way all along. It could be argued that this sort of “bundling” gives Google an unfair edge over Facebook. But, when I see that President Obama has 24 Million Facebook followers and less than 300,000 on G+, then I don’t think the “bundling” argument is very strong.
What has gotten a lot more bad press from tech bloggers recently is Google’s Search Plus Your World feature. Danny Sullivan discusses this at some length, and notes that there is a browser bookmarklet that will help you overcome the “evilness” of SPYW. What SPYW claims to do is to open up search results to include relevant results from social media. What it does in practice is to limit the social media results to those that come from G+, meaning that you could miss a ton of pertinent information that is available on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere.
At first blush, this seemed to me to be a dishonesty on Google’s part, and at the very least, a disservice to customers (users of SPYW). So, I decided to try it. Turns out that to try it, I had to sign up for Google+ again. What a pain in the ass. I ran some searches and clicked on the “include personal results” link, then clicked on the “don’t be evil bookmarklet” and didn’t see a lot of difference in results for the simple searches I used. Others have complained that the difference can be substantial, though, and I can see where it would be.
I think the problem with what Google is doing here is not so much that its intentions are “evil,” but that it has a reputation for showing results that are relevant and that represent data from all over the web, and it is not living up to that reputation with this new product. In a sense Google is misrepresenting the product, not in terms of the language they use to describe it, but because they should know that people have come to expect that Google always includes all pertinent information, and Google knows it’s not doing so.
Does it matter? Well, as long as you use the “don’t be evil bookmarklet” along with SPYW, then no: you get all the data you could expect to get. If you don’t use the bookmarklet, you will at least sometimes not get all the data you would expect. MG Siegler argues that the problem is not so much that Google is evil, as it is that they are making themselves less relevant. I think is right on target.
It seems to me that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are all trying to get as much market share as possible. Today Apple announced a quarterly revenue that is the highest by any company in history. No doubt we can expect to see Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft being more aggressive in response to this. So, be on the lookout!
The bottom line for all of these companies is: the one that best serves the needs of its customers will be the winner. Right now the winner is Apple, and Amazon probably comes in second (their financial stats are not as impressive as Google’s, but they will probably outlast Google as long as they keep their strong focus on customer satisfaction).