Google is the next GOD! Its controlling the way i think (another paranoid boring controversy on the web)

Google knows everthing about me, what i search on the web, where I live, my habits, my mails, details, it even has a picture of mine. I know we trust google, but history has shown us that all big companies , no matter how ethical they are cannot be relied upon and strive towards achieving  monopoly over the minds and thoughts of people.

Best example is the pepsi ad campaign in 80s showing the hip and smart crowd drinking pepsi, which led to decline in Coke’s share or free softwares with windows which famously drived out Corel, Lotus and Netscape from the markets in the 90s, maggi in india.

Similarly people are going crazy for google now, you BROWSE, CHECK MAIL,  WRITE BLOGS, STORE PHOTOS, STORE DOCUMENTS, MAKE 3D MODELS, SEE THE WORLD ON google earth, MEET PEOPLE, WATCH VIDEOS, LISTEN TO MUSIC, READ BOOKS, CHAT, USE PHONE and the biggest of all YOU DEFINETLY SEARCH on GOOGLE. its like almost evry thing you do on the internet .

Recently Google has been under microscope for its controversies (which have started to surface recently, like that of Microsoft did after 10 years of craze)

• Google recently  when defending its reproductions of professional photographs of scantily-clad women through its popular image-search feature claimed that the photographs are not “creative” enough to enjoy copyright law’s full protections because they’re intended primarily for “sexual gratification“. A federal court rejected that claim earlier this year.( click the link for more)
• The statement  “Reining in Google” has becoming rather popular in cyberspace. It discusses Google’s attempt to re-write copyright laws or at least reach a point of acceptance through persistence. They have already begun scanning books in 3 large libraries despite the looming lawsuits.MICROSOFT feels its being left out and is soon to join the race with google
• Youtube, orkut, blogger, sketch up and now next small company in the pipeline to be gulped is NAPSTER.
• Google NEWS now no longer in the BETA mode, has the news guys and reporters in a fix they say                   “‘They’re building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,’ Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. ‘The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.'””-(hitokiri)
• Rumor has it that GOOGLE provides biased search  (quote)”The New York Times reported that Google will give AOL preferred placement for AOL’s videos in Google’s video search in Google’s new Google Video search site. In addition, Google will include links to AOL videos on the Google Video home page — and won’t label any of those links advertising, or call the preferred listings advertising, even though they clearly are ads.”(unquote)-(click for source)
• Scariest thought is  about” indexing” the entire human knowledge -wait! what did I say?
• Gmail(creepy)  gives you so much space that “you never need to delete ” anything, not bad, but Google admits that deleted messages will remain on their system, and may be accessible internally at Google, for an indefinite period of time.
• On reading the privacy policy their is no mention that “google will not keep a list of keywords scanned from incoming email, and associate these with the incoming email address in their database”

While doing some background for this article i came across a website hosted by none other than Steve balmer(ceo microsoft), Liz Figueroa (senetor) and Mark Rasch , It has more techincally sound opinions than my blog does, you can check it out at http://www.google-watch.org/

Well upto some extents normal users like me won’t get affectd, I am just one of the 200million people a day who surfs internet, the possibility is scary. What if google sells information to governments  when you type the key word “free” ,”mp3″ “Download”, or when you click on the “pirate bay ” with your chrome browser and download something you shouldn’t.

 

FOR more

check out these sites after you see google-watch

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/gmail_spook_heaven/
• http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/11/04/google-controversy/
• http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/31/229200
• http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/01/10/the-google-api-controversies/

FOR fun check out

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlezon a funny take fiction on merger of google and amazon-googlezon
• http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/ the original site of stanford days which Sergey(one of the founders of google) still hosts.
• http://iuron.com/ is this the future of search?

where do u go for answers

GOOGLE this, – number of hits you get when you google these 25 random keywords ( from polar bear to video to space)

When we google things we usually ignore the number of results we get, I decided upon 25 keywords and see which one is the most dominant on the web. here are the results. yeah i was sleepy!

where”dot com” takes the maximum hits, things like “polar bear” remain low, “google” seems to be most present company and “one” the famous number.

 

01…..025,680,000,000-.”com”

02…..022,050,000,000-“1” i.e.0ne

03…..008,480,000,000-“I” i.e i

04…..005,240,000,000-“United States”

05…..003,920,000,000-“free”

06…..003,250,000,000-“video”

07…..003,060,000,000-“Google”

08…..002,260,000,000-“music”

09…..002,030,000,000-“high”

10…..001,890,000,000-“love”

11…..001,120,000,000-“space”

12…..000,893,000,000-“microsoft”

13…..000,693,000,000-“sex”

14…..000,382,000,000-“cup”

15…..000,258,000,000-“wikipedia”

16…..000,240,000,000-“dollar”

17…..000,230,000,000-“hero”

18…..000,165,000,000-“hole”

19…. 000,087,800,000-“alien”

20…..000,044,300,000-“climate change”

21…..000,025,100,000-“mosquito”

22…..000,017,400,000-“condom”

23…..000,020,200,000-“cheetah“

24…..000,007,190,000-“polar bear”

25…..000,002,750,000-“abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”

any other YAWNFULLY intresting thing? please comment