Google Worse Than Evil: Just Plain Bad

When Google made news last week with its policy of collapsing users’ data and tracked information into a soupy Orwellian cluster fuck, the most annoying and frustrating aspect of 21st century Google search went virtually unaddressed: the best, most relevant search engine has consciously and aggressively evolved into arguably the worst.

Privacy is important and the fact that our so-called anonymous tracking information can relatively easily – and almost assuredly already has been or will be – associated with the individual user, is frightening and a bit scandalous. For me, though, any expectation of privacy and anonymity on the web went out the window years ago. I do all the obvious and some not-so-obvious stuff to protect what privacy may still be possible, but I hardly care what anyone knows about me. I have nothing to hide (well, almost nothing) and I decry online anonymity whenever possible for the insane volume of ugliness, inhumanity and pain it generates.

However…

You may already be aware of this, but Google now delivers a different set of results to each user no matter how exact the search words or phrases. With hundreds of millions of us relying so heavily on Google for nearly everything we know and believe about the world, the most alarming thing to me is that Google’s search algorithms no longer serve its users. Instead, they’re exclusively in service to the company’s paying customers, its advertisers.

(If you haven’t done it yet, try this: do two searches using Google. One should be your name and the other can be anything you want. Now, ask a couple of friends in other cities to do the same searches and send you the results.)

Google is a free, ad-supported service that earns many billions of dollars each year which used to be an awesome deal for everyone. Google was happy, their advertisers were happy and best of all, we were happy. We willingly turned a blind eye to the fact that Google’s billions were being earned off our backs; off the bread crumbs we left behind as we traveled the path so expertly blazed for us by Brin and Page across our digital lives.

Unfortunately, though certainly not unexpectedly, Google then went the way of brick and mortar robber barons of old. They decided that nothing would trump revenue, earnings and profit. They sold their soul to the devil, a transaction that can actually work out quite nicely when appropriately applied. For instance, when Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, everyone came away a winner. Mr. Johnson was lifted out of poverty and obscurity, musicians the world over were emboldened and inspired by Johnson’s mastery of the blues, billions of people’s lives were enriched by the music and the devil’s been preoccupied with blues music now since 1938 leaving the job of making people blue to Islamic terrorists, North Korean dictators and Carl Rove.

On the other hand, when billionaires sell their soul to the devil, no one gets a very good deal. The billionaires get something they don’t need and can’t use: more billions. The devil gets a couple of worthless souls and likely sticks ‘em on a back shelf in a dark room somewhere far from the gorgeous blues music wafting through most of the rest of the empire. The shareholders get a portfolio bump but their Google results suffer disproportionately.

Then there’s us, the hundreds of millions of users who made it possible for the company to thrive in the first place. What do we get? In exchange for ever more and more deeply personal data, we get a search engine that no longer returns the freshest, most accurate results. Instead, they’re (very poorly) tailored to each of us individually. Google’s algorithms look at our search words and phrases, they match those words and phrases to the crap that their advertisers are hawking, they mix it all up with what they think we want to see based on what they’ve ‘learned’, intuited and guessed about who we are, what we like, what we’re curious about – and now who we know – and they spit out a set of results that are guaranteed to be less fresh, less relevant and less valuable than ever before.

In other words, they’re using us – the folks who know so little about stuff that we’re constantly asking Google for the answer – as the basis *for* the answer. How insane is that? Rather than possibly expanding our horizons; exposing us to something or someone new and interesting, they’re dumbing down the results. Google claims this is a good thing. They claim the results are more relevant to each individual user. More to the point, they say the ads are custom tailored to our needs and desires.

First, I don’t need to be reminded that they’ve learned as much as they have about my needs and desires. Second, they don’t know me and they never will. Brilliantly, though, by being so public about all this and taking a bunch of barely-stinging surface heat from the media and privacy advocates about how expansive and granular the information is that Google is collecting, they’re cementing in their advertisers’ minds that their inflated ad rates for so-called targeted advertising are actually a bargain.

That’s bad news for us today but it’s going to be even worse news for Google tomorrow. Personally, I’ve almost completed a transition away from Gmail which has been my default email address for years. (I’m using mostly a privately hosted email server but even Hotmail/Microsoft is a much better bet than Google. Having recently worked there on a year-long contract, I was surprised and impressed with their emphasis on privacy. Nothing’s perfect but today, Gmail is bottom of the barrel from a privacy standpoint.) I’ve rarely used Chrome and never will again. As for search engines, I still use Google as a back-up, but my default now is DuckDuckGo which doesn’t collect, share or pass along any personal information, including your search words which are very definitely personal information. Another alternative is Sartpage.com which acts as a proxy, passing your search along anonymously to Google. Here’s more information about anonymous search.

Google is a behemoth, but like the dinosaur, even seemingly invincible creatures can and do succumb. In fact, it’s a virtual lock that both Google and Facebook (an ever more troubling parasite) will both – sooner than later – be made irrelevant. In each case, the reason will be greed. For Google and Facebook, the only meaningful amount of money is more money.

To paraphrase Edward Everett Horton from one of my favorite (and so relevant to this conversation) movies of all time, “Holiday,” my dad made me promise to quit after my first billion.

Light a fire for appropriate levels of greed by de-Googling today!

(Caveat Emptor – Next time I have something to sell, I’ll almost certainly be using Google to help do it.)