The Times of London
January 24, 2005
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1455082,00.html

    Former teenaged dot.com millionaire Benjamin Cohen checks out Google's
privacy policies and dislikes what he finds

    Google In Search of Its Soul

    by Benjamin Cohen

    Internet users are fickle. One day's hit website can quickly end up
being found only in the recess of someone's Internet Explorer history
folder.

    I remember when I first got online back in 1997, Altavista was the
best search engine out there and I think I made it my default home page.
There was also Hotbot and Excite which I used from time to time. Today,
everyone seems to use Google, but I might its popularity be about to wane?

    Launched from a garage, but with a $1 million investment from Andy
Bechtolsheim (founder of Sun Microsystems) in late 1998, Google has grown
to become the search engine of choice for millions of people. It was hyped
up by everyone, especially anti-corporate types who admired the site's
anti-establishment attitude and lack of graphic advertising. In fact, back
then, there was a lack of any advertising at all.

    Then it all changed in late 2000, when Google introduced a limited
advertising product, called Adwords, in the United States. I remember when
I first heard about it, I thought that the Google guys must be mad. Unlike
all the other search engine advertising companies (like Overture and

    Espotting) they charged not per click, but per impression. I did a
test campaign on one of my sites and lost about $100 in a day without a
single visitor to my website. Google learned fast that this model could
not work and in 2001 they launched the cost-per-click adwords system that
is used by hundreds of thousands of small and large advertisers across the
globe.

    The system itself is well designed and does what it sets out to do,
promoting websites and making a charge every time someone visits your
website. In fact, it does more than that, since the price you pay is
determined by the "relevancy" of your ad and the price that other
advertisers are willing to pay. This results in a different cost each time
someone visits your site, based on those variables.

    I've used the system to promote my own cash back shopping search
engine, and it performed significantly better than any of the other search
advertising networks and I will be using the it again.

    So why do I think that Google's popularity will wane?

    Part of the reason has to do with how much I like it as an advertiser.
Google's moves to G-mail and desktop searching have allowed me to target
users more effectively and in ways that will increase the exposure of my
brand. But, if much of Google's initial success was based on its
consumer-friendly approach, then they are the same reasons that it is
starting to annoy me as an internet user.

    I've signed up to everything Google has to offer. I've got a G-Mail
email account which I use about 100 times a day and I've installed their
desktop search which, despite the name, searches your entire hard drive
and integrates these results with web searches on Google. It does become
annoying when you're reading an e-mail, say, from your mother about what
time to go for dinner and there's an advert saying, "Fed up with Mom's
cooking? Go out for dinner, click here" or when you receive an order
confirmation for a new DVD recorder and there's an advert telling you that
you've actually overpaid for the goods because you are British and that
you could get the same thing in the US for half the price. It sometimes
makes me yell, "I know but I can't use it here, it's not compatible, stop
rubbing my face in it!"

    Aside from the annoyance of the advertising, there are important
concerns over privacy. Google probably know everything there is to know
about me. The Google tool bar which stands proudly on my Internet Explorer
browser reports back to them on every website that I ever visit (which in
part explains why their index is so comprehensive). They've got thousands
of my e-mails, some from personal contacts and others containing
confidential business negotiations. They can search my hard drive
directly, from that they could read my business accounts, get the code for
my websites, and delve into my more personal files.

    Now, initially I had no objections to Google being able to do this,
because I have the choice not to use their service. I could stick to
Outlook to manage my e-mail, but I think that G-Mail is much better. I
could use the built-in file search function on my PC, but I think that the
Google Desktop Search service is much better. I tended to think that those
that moan about Google's privacy policies should just shut up and handle
it or stop using their services.

    But as it goes, recently I started to think differently and took an
opportunity to delve into Google's privacy policies more carefully.

    For starters, every time you search, Google places a cookie on your
computer. Now this is normal practice: my website will place cookies that
identify you to our server. However, while my website, in common with many
others, uses 30-day cookies, Google's will not expire until 2038 - or
about seven times the expected lifetime of your computer. They also record
your searches, together with IP and cookie ID on their servers and they
store them indefinitely, but they do not say why they need this data. I've
always had it drummed into me that its important to explain to a user why
we need to keep certain data on them. In fact, it's a requirement of the
Data Protection Act in the UK. The Google toolbar reports back to Google
every site you visit, although you can turn this feature off. What is
unusual about it though is that it auto-updates itself with new features
without either asking you or informing you that it has taken place. Even
Microsoft doesn't do this.

    In recent months, a host of anti-Google websites have sprung up, which
claim that one of the key technical whizzes behind the search engine "used
to work for the National Security Agency" and that "Google wants to hire
more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their
corporate assets to the spooks in Washington". The Google Watch site also
claims that the Google cache is illegal. The Google News service, which
contains links to thousands of news stories each day, also comes under
fire from a variety of pro-democracy groups.

    But its not just consumers who might start to despair of Google.
Eventually, it will be webmasters and advertisers, too.

    Google already accounts for 75 per cent of referrals to websites
(including the referrals made by other sites powered by Google). If you
want to be seen on the web, you have to be listed on Google. Whether you
are seen or not by users or just buried on page 753,046 of 1,2448,344 is
an entirely different matter. Google ranks pages based on their own (and
highly secretive) technology, supposedly based on the number of websites
linking to yours, and this determines relevancy.

    This is all well and good, but what if you've just started and have
yet to tell anyone about the site? As someone once said, the cure for
cancer could be on the web somewhere; it's just that no one's linked to
it, so it's not listed by Google.

    Google's market dominance is already thought by some to be approaching
a monopoly. In 2002, 95 per cent of internet browsing originated from
Internet Explorer users, which lead to prosecutions of Microsoft in the
United States and Europe under anti-competition laws. With 75 per cent of
users finding websites on Google, their share of the total online
advertising spend is increasing daily. I'm sure that they will reach 60
per cent of the total search engine advertising spend this year and total
dominance of the entire online sector will follow. This is worrying
because eventually Google will be able to charge advertisers what they
want to be listed, because without being listed on Google, you won't get
any visitors. They may even begin to charge all webmasters to list any
site in their general index, at present free of charge.

    In order to stop themselves disappearing into the history folders,
Google need to know when to stop, both in terms of encroaching on consumer
privacy and when to stop charging webmasters to list their sites.

    Google is no longer run by a couple of cool college kids from a
garage. Instead, it is a multi-national corporation with its eyes on its
stock market price and providing immediate returns to shareholders.
Perhaps gazing into the past and seeing the failings of those who
monopolise markets will enable them to reach the future. Either that, or
perhaps its time the regulators step in and either break apart their
businesses, encourage a more competitive market place or else we'll be
stuck with a company that in the words of Google-Watch is heading for
"world domination, this time with multicoloured letters".

    [Benjamin Cohen is the founder of QuickQuid. He will be writing an
occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman [sic] in
the tech sector ]

    ***

    See also:

Scroogle.org
http://www.scroogle.org for some nice links:

    paste-in code for webmasters:
http://www.scroogle.org/masters.html

    traffic graphs:
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/tgraph.htm

    How to configure Firefox to block Google ads: bottom of the page at
http://www.scroogle.org/gscrape.html


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