Google Corporate Greed or Responsibility?
By Jonah Stein, Alchemist Media, Inc.
Is Google Too Powerful?
Google is the most efficient and effective place for online advertisers to reach customers. The Google’s founders understood the importance of relevance early in the game and they have built a lead they refuse to relinquish. All of the search engines have made tremendous strides in the last few years, but Google continues to stretch their lead.
Google is the default gateway to search. For most of our clients, 65%-80% of search driven revenue is attributed to Google through either keyword search or brand search. 50% of brand revenue also goes through Google, with site visitors either searching by brand or using navigational search. Alchemist Media is White Hat SEO, so this would never happen to our clients, but if a company is banned from Google completely, they could see traffic drop by over 60%. A Google ban is the 21st century version of having your phone turned off. A single Google employee can make a decision that can shut down a company.
Google is not a monopoly. Google doesn’t manipulate their search results to favor partners or to enter new markets. They don’t demand exclusive contracts or use legal maneuvers or intimidation to make friends or influence people; they simply go out and kick their competitions’ behinds.
Their explosive growth to market dominance has not been obtained through bullying, predatory practices or exclusive contracts. They have not left a trail of trampled competitors whose value suddenly disappeared as Google incorporated their functionality into a new release. In short, they haven’t followed the path of other well known companies who have been accused of being too powerful. Google has simply out competed every other company in search by focusing on relevancy and user experience.
Peter Parker observed that, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The amazing thing about Google is that they have generally honored that responsibility. Google has (with a few exceptions) shown that they honor their responsibilities. They have been the leader in fostering cooperation between search engines and webmasters. Matt Cutts, both writing as the Google Guy and appearing at conferences and later through his blog, almost single handedly re-defined the relationship between webmaster and search engine. Vanessa Fox, Adam Lasnik and the rest of the Google team has carried that torch, armed with a mandate from Larry Page that webmaster relationships are a top priority. They have also shown leadership in advancing inter-engine cooperation on standards like Sitemap.org and robots.txt.
Big Corporation As Big Brother
Privacy and information collection has been a storm cloud over Double Click since their inception, leading to a lawsuit in 2000. Public awareness of the privacy issue with regards to search is a more recent phenomenon. Google collects enormous amounts of data about user queries, click through and surfing behavior. Much of this data is collected without the user’s understanding. Add DoubleClick to Google’s arsenal of data collection tools (Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, Adsense beacons, Pay Per Action, Website Optimizer), and Google has an unprecedented and frightening ability to profile user behavior. The most disturbing ability the means to associate names and email addresses collected on one site with a user visit to another.
Given a choice between Double Click and GoogleClick as the custodian of our innermost thought, we should be much more comfortable with the latter. Google has been the shining beacon in protecting individual privacy compared to the rest of the industry. Google fought the Department Of Justice, and won, while Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL meekly – and silently - handed over our search histories without a fight.
All of this praise should be balanced with a few caveats:
Google’s growth has made for a large company that doesn’t always practice what they preach. Current search results shows some rough edges. The integration of features like Local and SiteBox with regular search can create strange results and allow a single company to dominate the SERP. Personalization is in it’s early phase and sometimes confuses users.
Google is a hypocrite when it comes the slippery slope between paid editorial review (Yahoo Directory, BOTW, Business.com) and paid links. Adsense is a form of paid linking and it has done more to create and promote spam, scraper sites, junk directories and other detritus than anything else on the web. Aaron Wall observed, “Google allows Adsense to be placed on sites without regard to quality of content and they advise blending your ads to look like site navigation, a perfect example of deceiving the user.”
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Google’s dominance of search marketing in the western world is almost complete. Double Click allows them to similarly dominate display advertising. They are beginning the long march towards personalization and One-To-One marketing that will fundamentally change how both search and display advertising is delivered. Their latest business model, Pay Per Action, may evolve over time into Google being the not so silent partner in every website.
Google’s data collection and video delivery positions them to be able to similarly dominate the evolution of TV advertising from national networks to local market to individual receiver boxes. That race isn’t over, but Google is positioned to own the data that will determine the outcome.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. So far, they are off to strong start in not only organizing the information, but in monetizing it. In the information age, successfully organizing the world’s information grants almost unlimited power.
The real question is not “Is Google Too Powerful”. Google is clearly both extremely powerful and positioned to be even more powerful in the future. The real question is how will Google honor the great responsibility that comes with power when profits are not growing 50% per quarter; when times are tougher, decisions are not black or white, and the idealists who created the juggernaut have cashed in their options and move on.
Can the Don’t Be Evil corporate culture endure and protect us from what is emerging as the most dominant and powerful enterprise in history. If so, it will be the first time in history that corporate responsibility wins out over corporate greed.
Somehow, I doubt it!
Jonah Stein is Senior SEM Director for Alchemist Media, a search engine marketing company with offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and writer for The Alchemy of Search and ItsTheRoi.
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