Big Brother

Google has become one of four biggest search engine databases that there is on the net. Or course there are a lot more than just those four databases however, they haven’t gained the popularity or access that Google and the other three big search engines have. Simply put, nobody else can search the web for potential search results as efficiently as them. Yahoo, one of the other top search engine databases, has just as much potential to be “on top” as Google. The search engine technology that Yahoo runs has been shown to be nearly equivalent to Google’s. One reason that Yahoo is so close behind is that Google’s services have started to decline. Microsoft was even competing with Yahoo which was starting to cripple Microsoft as far as search engine capability is concerned. So Microsoft started working on their search engine as well, to improve it drastically.

There is no doubt that Google owns the search engine business, they provide about 75 percent of the external referrals for most websites. It does not take too much imagination to recognize that there's a struggle going on for the soul of the web, and the focal point of this struggle is Google itself. At one level, advertising is a huge part of this struggle, the other part of the struggle is privacy. The issue of Government surveillance against privacy comes into account when thinking of Google’s capabilities of collecting a users’ data. Because of this ability, Google had been nominated for the Big Brother award in 2003.

Google was the first to use a cookie that was designed to not expire until 2038; this was the same time when Federal sites couldn’t even use cookies to collect personal user data. Google can record the IP address of any person that uses the search engine as well as the users search itself. It will record the time and date and the users geographic location. This, of course, is a good way to keep track of people for advertising purposes or more sinister purposes. 200 million people type search for something in the Google engine everyday, the potential of the loss of privacy at this rate is growing increasingly.

Personally, I love Google, it’s easy, and they provide a lot of useful tools such as Google Earth and Gmail on top of their very useful search engine. The simple fact that they can collect anyone’s personal data is not really a surprise; the only factor that changes this to become potentially threatening is that so many people use Google. Other than that, Google is not the only company on the web that has such an ability to collect personal data. It doesn’t even surprise me that the toolbar they provide for web browsers is considered spyware, I’ve never used it, and the word “toolbar” shouts spyware to me in any context. There will come a time when no one can hide and we’re all so very dependant on the internet now that it’s really unavoidable. The one thing I would worry about is the ability for Google to reach its powerful hand out of my computer monitor and choke me to death, I think I still have a couple years to remain safe.