Here are some of my views, again, about Google and its possible future, and no, they are not 'good guys'.

• Google has become a quasi monopolistic instance on the internet
• The FCC has noticed it and they are now thinking about 'search neutrality'
• No, Google are not such good guys, neither that innovative, and tend to buy everything they can to crush the concurrence, or to bypass their search own algorithms to promote their products
• Not only the FCC has noticed that, but some devs are getting worried too
• Their relevance is less and less a fact, and they might be outsmarted by social networking websites
• Not long until a broader public notices it
• Still, going open would clean all this mess

If you've had the luck to spend some of you bits of boredom reading this blog, you probably know that I like to follow Google's strategies and evolution. You also probably know it somewhat worries me, even if I'm still enthused by their product.

It's too bad I'm publishing this post now, since everybody is busy with end-of-the-year-festivities and nobody will notice the fabulous article I am linking here: Search, but You May Not Find (nytimes.com)

It's all about search neutrality, or how Google, Yahoo and Bing are now "the gatekeepers of the internet". How it can unbalance the market and how someone should do something about it.

It begins on this cheerful note (bold is mine):

The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company: Google. With 71 percent of the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. Google’s revenues exceeded $21 billion last year, but this pales next to the hundreds of billions of dollars of other companies’ revenues that Google controls indirectly through its search results and sponsored links.

Ok, until now nothing really new, we already know Google is very big. The sponsored links and search result part is maybe a bit less obvious, since many users are now tending to think that Google is the Internet. Think about it, not only G (I'll call it G yes, I feel lazy tonight) has contributed to create some huge fortunes, but there is now a whole market of SEO consulting and optimization entirely centered on them. Frightening bit, when you think about the metric cartload of so called "SEO specialist", Black Hat SEO pseudo hackers, content and link farms gravitating around it. G has an enormous influence on the economy both above and underground, and if you're in IT, you probably owe it your job, a way or another.

Ok, this bit is secured, pretty glad it was obvious.Next:

Another way that Google exploits its control is through preferential placement [..]promoting its own services at or near the top of its search results, bypassing the algorithms it uses to rank the services of others[...] Wherever it does so, incumbents are toppled, new entrants are suppressed and innovation is imperiled.[...]Some will argue that Google is itself so innovative that we needn’t worry. But the company isn’t as innovative as it is regularly given credit for[...]Google’s meteoric success, are essentially borrowed inventions: Google acquired AdSense by purchasing Applied Semantics in 2003; and AdWords, though developed by Google, is used under license from its inventors, Overture.

NICE TO KNOW! And nice to know I'm not a lunatic, the whole article make me feel I'm not alone, and this bit precisely, makes me feel that I'm right to worry.
That's one thing if Google is what it pretends to be, (that is: an open and innovative search engine pushing everyday the limits of information gathering and usability), and another thing altogether when it appears that the G is a buy-and-squash machine, intending to become the one vortex to any info hosted,shared, advertised or created on the web, from anywhere.

You can perfectly react thinking that, after all, they are offering a free service and no company should rely on free services (yeahright), that after all, they have the right to advertise their own product (it's not like they were, say, Microsoft and bundling, say, a browser with their operating system). And well, if people are so worried, people shall build their own monopolistic search engine.

Thinking like that would be logical, but no thank you. Be it with OS, Telecoms or search engines, monopole is bad.

From this point, how is the future branching?

G's core functionality is slowly but surely losing its appeal, losing relevance everyday while being submerged by content/link farms, domain parkers ands the likes. Users are more and more accustomed to seek information through social networking rather than organic search. Online marketers are aware of that.
Big Daddy G has also proven to be hungry enough to worry the FCC, that's almost an epiphany.
Until now, all they needed to do in order to prove the 'purity' of their policies was to hurl widgets at the crowd while screaming "We are no evil!". FCC is bad publicity, they will have to work harder.
If nothing is done, they could leave the lead to other runner-ups such as Cuil and "the word of the fingers". Worse, some developers are being seriously annoyed by their API policy and the word could spread pretty fast, leaving them without another major source of innovation.
See by yourself (readwriteweb.com and totlol.com)

Google releases a public API. They watch what third-party developers do with the API and modify the Terms of Service (ToS) for that API in a way that prevents breakthrough potential. Google may then move to offer a similar service based on their platform rather than the API.

That, dear sir, is a pissed-off developer talking from experience.

In order to regain the relevance they build their reputation upon, going social would be a great idea. It would also, if the FCC rules out for a search neutrality regulation, reinforce the hegemony driven image they are starting to acquire.

What they could do though, to get rid of any suspicions and confirm their good will toward the users and the Quality Of The Interwebs, is to go 100% open, even if they don't really seem to like the idea.

Year 2010 will be interesting. Wait and see.





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