I have a real love/hate with Google.  I love that its fast. I love that they seem to crawl just about everything so I can find obscure stuff.  I love that they embrace the mobile platform. I really love that Google is the absolute best way to look up a restaurant phone number and address.  Actually, I like that so much here’s your quick tutorial if you are unfamiliar with it:

1. Pick a restaurant you want to go to
2. Go to google (or mobile).
3. Enter the name of the restaurant and the name of the city you live in.
4. Ta-da - here are some examples: (Denny’s Ottumwa Iowa, Burma Super Star San Francisco, Carnegie Deli New York City)

So how is Google screwing up the Internet?  Well, its about the money.  See, at the end of the day, Google is not really about information, it is about content and data. And more than that, it’s about money. And I don’t blame them for wanting to make money.  The problem is that the combination of their money-making model with their technology has created a massive hole in the value of the results you get.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Google’s technology, basically links appear because of link networking.  So if you type in, say “George Bush” you get results from the White House web site, the GOP, etc.  This is because lots and lots of people link to those sites.  But if you scroll down far enough you’ll start to see links like this one.  In fact, me linking to that site right there has marginally increased its relevance in the eyes of Google.

The problem here is there is a complete lack of control over the information set.  If tons of people all link to the same site with the same term, it’s called “Googlebombing” and as a result, if you search for the word “failure” you see a link to George Bush’s biography.  While this is funny (and quite funny at that), it is creating a very untrustworthy set of results.  If a group of people wanted to really promote an individual or service (aka black hat marketing), they could set about a googlebombing effort that effectively misleads the general public.  The more that “everyday people” trust the search results Google provides as facts the more problematic this becomes.

The secondary issue that comes out of this is the way money plays into Google’s use and abuse.  For example, there is the ‘Adsense non-Web site’ (also called Adsense spam).  This is a Web site that really doesn’t do anything other than buy adsense ads and redirect to other Web sites, either for ad dollars or for affiliate networks.  Another example is when you try to find a specific product (example a laptop or a hotel) and instead of getting information, the top links are all from those manipulating the system to get on top.  Some people are even creating businesses whose sole purpose is to help proliferate more spam!

So if you want to go buy a new TV, and you do a little research, you might decide to pick up a Sony Bravia (this would be a bad decision, as they are ridiculously overpriced goods from a company who can’t even figure out how to build an MP3 player right, and really haven’t done anything all that good since the Walkman).  If you search for “sony bravia lcd tv” the entire “top of the fold” is all links to sell you something. This would be fine if you searched for “buy sony bravia lcd tv” but I think its just clutter when you are looking up a product (or a hotel - go try to find phone numbers for international hotels - virtually impossible because hotels.com and expedia and the others have bought all the slots and hide the numbers from you - although TravelPost doesn’t do that). 

At the end of the day, Google’s search engine is unquestionably the best system for creating a totally ‘technologically unbiased’ database for the Web.  It’s easy to get into a debate about who is to blame, guns vs bullets vs people who like to use guns to shoot bullets at other people.  Personally, I think Larry and Sergey have created a lot of free guns and offer a lot of free ammo to anybody who feels like shooting things.  At least Wal-mart checks your ID first.