For all of us googling monkeys.
Is a Do-Gooder Company a Good Thing?
By AMY HARMON - NYT
In the letter last Thursday that announced their plans to sell shares to the public, Google's founders were not bashful about the role they see for their company in the information utopia they hope to build.
"Searching and organizing all the world's information," the letter stated, is "an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good."
That company would, of course, be Google, which in the five years since it was founded by two Stanford graduate students has won 65 million users and turned "googling" into a verb. In Silicon Valley, the company is revered for putting its mission before immediate financial gain.
But will Google be able to adhere to its famous corporate ethos, "don't do evil," with its role as the Internet's chief gatekeeper bolstered by the several billion dollars a stock sale is expected to raise? Supporters and critics alike agree that the public would do well to scrutinize the effects of Google's outsize influence, whether or not it adheres to its promises of trustworthiness.
"Google's greatest challenge, beyond innovation or competition, is what to do with the gift of power that the culture has bestowed on them," said John Battelle, a media consultant who is writing a book about searching the Internet.
Mostly, those who use Google's search engine trust it to provide unbiased results. But some close observers say its algorithms and advertising policies cannot help but be shaped by money and morality. Google says it does its best to remain neutral.
Earlier this month, the company said it had no plans to alter its search results despite complaints that the first listing on a search for the word "Jew" directed people to an anti-Semitic Web site. But it did append a note to the top of its listings that said, "We're disturbed about these results as well" and a link explaining that "because of our objective and automated ranking system, Google cannot be influenced by these petitions." (The site was offline for a few days, so it is not currently displayed in Google's rankings, a Google spokesman said. It may return to a top spot now that it is back up.)
Because Google is so popular, its smallest decisions can carry great weight. Rogers Cadenhead, a Web site developer and author, said he was disturbed that Google supports one format for distributing Web log entries over another. "I would boycott Google if I could," said Mr. Cadenhead, of St. Augustine, Fla., who said he spends hours a day on the site. "But I can't. It's like boycotting gas."
A few days before Google declared its intention to raise public money, for instance, Bill Wyatt, the owner of a T-shirt store in Los Angeles, was informed that the company would not accept his paid advertisement unless he removed several shirts with anti-Bush slogans from his site, including "You're Fired - George W. Bush."
The e-mail message from Google, published by Mr. Wyatt on his Web site, explained that the company's policy prohibits advertisements for "site content that advocates against an individual, group or organization."
"The problem for me is that Google constitutes such a large amount of the Web traffic that essentially it's like being denied the opportunity to sell it," Mr. Wyatt said. "You have to start gauging your products in terms of, are they going to offend Google?"
Many small businesses say it is hard to overestimate Google's power to drive traffic to their Web sites - or steer it away. Although other search engines like Yahoo and MSN maintain a healthy share of Internet advertising dollars, Webmasters estimate that 75 percent of all of their visitors come directly from Google.
"People optimize for Google; they study Google,'' said Brett Tabke, the chief executive of Webmasterworld.com. "It's Google in the morning, Google at night, Google all the time. "
Last November, when Google changed the algorithm that governs how sites are ranked, many businesses registered howls of protest as they watched their sales plummet during the Christmas season. Some accused the company of trying to force them to buy advertising instead of relying on a free listing.
A search for "St. Louis" and "embroidery" used to list Personalized Mementos, a small embroidery store in St. Louis, in third or fourth place, said Mark Halloran, the company's chief executive. Since November, he said, it has "dropped off the face of the earth."
"It was devastating," said Mr. Halloran, who said he didn't complain directly to Google because he assumed his company was too small to matter.
In the political realm, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said Google had voluntarily decided to remove certain hate sites in its German and French versions that could be deemed illegal in those countries. Mr. Zittrain, whose organization is cataloging the omissions (cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/), said the move raised concerns about the pressure governments can exert on Google to censor data.
"Google serves such an important gatekeeping role that its decisions have implications for speech and the exchange of ideas," Mr. Zittrain said. "Imagine John Ashcroft calling Google and saying, 'Get rid of that Web site.' "
Still, many Internet observers say they are heartened by the unusual commitment to the public interest voiced by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. "I think it's really good that someone whose motto is 'don't be evil' is in this position,'' said Esther Dyson, an Internet analyst. "Power itself isn't the problem. We just have to hope they don't abuse it.''
Besides, Google is not yet all-powerful, as the sport of "Google bombing'' has proved. If enough Web pages link a certain Web page to a phrase, the Google search engine will start to associate that page with the phrase. That is why anyone searching on Google for the phrase "weapons of mass destruction'' will find what looks like an error message as the top ranking. "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed,'' it reads. "The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable."
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