Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 9:26 am Post subject: Google v. Apps, Privacy |
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The Case Against Google
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But while Google was busy holding up the sky, the ground beneath its feet shifted in ways it didn't anticipate. Our searches have evolved from the merely factual to the deeply personal. We want to find a nice hotel or a good restaurant or a particular person. We want to know what's happening right now, right here. And increasingly, we turned to smaller, fragmented, platforms to get that stuff.
Facebook did for people searching what Google did for Web searching, in a very similar way. While Google used existing links between Web pages to determine relevance, Facebook used the existing links between people�the connections that we ourselves defined�to determine social relevance.
It explains why Facebook works so well right from the gate. Log onto Facebook for the first time, give it some social data�like your contacts database, your workplace, your high school, your university�and it begins finding people you know as if by magic.
Google was never very good at that. It doesn't know who we know. Let's say I'm looking to connect with Joe Brown: If I enter his name into Google, I'll get thousands of results for various Joes all over the world�judges, punk rockers, comedians. But on Facebook, when I enter his name, I find exactly who I want because he's connected to so many of my other friends already.
The backlinks my friends have already established give Facebook a social relevance Google doesn't have. And because Facebook hides the connections in its social graph, Google can't index that data. It can't understand it. In other words, Google can't even use what Facebook knows about me to know which Joe Brown I am looking for. (You know, this guy.)
And as we have begun to carry the Internet with us everywhere we go�posting photos and status updates and blog posts and videos along the way�we've increasingly wanted a different type of relevance, one that speaks more to what's relevant right now than overall and forever. We want up to the millisecond data. The kind of thing found on, say, Twitter.
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Google wants to know things about you that you aren't already telling it so you will continue asking it questions and it can continue serving ads against the questions you ask it. So, it feels like it has to herd people into using Google+ whether they want to go there or not.
This explains why Google has been driving privacy advocates crazy and polluting its search results. It explains why now, on the Google homepage, there's a big ugly black bar across the top that reminds you of all its properties. It explains the glaring red box with the meaningless numbers that so desperately begs you to come see what's happening in its anti-social network. It explains why Google is being a bully. It explains why Google broke search: Because to remain relevant it has to give real-world answers.
Google has to get you under its tent, and break down all the silos between its individual products once you're there. It needs you to reveal your location, your friends, your history, your desires, your finances; nothing short of your essence. And it needs to combine all that knowledge together. That's Search Plus Your World. "Your World" is not just your friends, or your location. It's your everything. The breadth of information Google wants to collect and collate is the stuff of goosebumps.
And the thing is, Google's going to get it. All of it. |
Read on for an argument of why Google may be evil, using Google's own guiding standard of "don't be evil." |
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