itloc - 7:28 am on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hello The Shower Scene

I do have to agree - great first posting. Welcome!

If one is seeing the web from a search engine's perspective (not only Google) the guidelines make definitely sense. If your main asset is the quality of your search results you're in a constant fight with those who want to "abuse" your service. I am talking of people that focus primarly on creating scraped pages, meshing up existing content etc etc. to get high rankings, lots of visitors and high (yes!) Adsense earnings...basically the dark side of the web. Cheaters, spammers and the like...

The Webmaster tools, Adsense, Analytics and others are great for Google to get "off site" information that can be used to verify the source (neighborhood etc.) of information. Remember "Trustrank"? I do believe (and most will agree) that these factors are very, very important these days. Using off site factors and performance data is a great way to rank a website. Or even several websites...from the same person (company. eg.)

I do strongly believe Google updates would be less hard for honest webmasters and take less collateral damage without all the cheaters, crap guys and spammers out there...

On the other hand:

Google is not only the world's number one search engine - they have a tremendeous level of trust from their users. No other company in the world would be able to collect such a huge amount of user related data - without raising up global protests. Just imagine Microsoft would like to track the websites you're acessing with your windows computer - wow, can you hear the cries?

Years ago there was something from Microsoft called bcentral. It had another name before (cant remember) - and some other solutions. Also some kind of a central registration, affiliate programs, banner exchange and the like. Many sites have used these scripts on their pages. I thought then - wow, this is dangerous ... they are able to collect so much sensitive data from it. Well, Microsoft had a lake of information then .. today, Google has an ocean.

I do believe that Google has to interlink the different information sources they have – in order to use that data in a productive way. That means they started to connect their index with the webmaster tools, adsense performance information, analytics performance information, toolbar performance information, adwords spendings etc. etc. Nothing wrong with that. We still partially decide what we give away here…

B U T :

As an example: All over the world there is extensive data collecting from different authorities. Police, secret service, echelon whoever … they collect data about what we do, which emails we send, credit card spendings, our calls etc. This is not kind of a funky conspiracy theory – that’s a fact. I don’t want to get deeper into this – just to mention that the INTERLINKING of these informations and LONG TIME STORAGE is forbidden (for authorities) in most modern democracies. It’s called privacy protection and understood as a human right.

[un.org...] / Article 12

Now don’t misunderstand me. Google has the great intention of “making the worlds information available”. They do that – and they do that very well in my opinion. But the way they do it today is risky (IMHO). Probably it’s the only way…but let me raise some questions:

- Is Google giving away any of the information they collect? We’re talking of the biggest and largest global data collection here.

- What if someone is abusing that data? Happened before with other data collectors…

- Is there a non profit organization that is watching and controlling what they do do with these tremendous amounts of information?

As mentioned before – Google has a tremendous level of trust. I do believe they deserve it. Still, there is no control and Google is not only a market leader – they are nearly having a monopoly for search.

I would call it a very dangerous concentration of power…in a way…

Regards

itloc