Shadows In Motion

I’m going to endulge in a bit of a nerd rant here, folks.

For the past, oh, few months or so my opinion has been growing more and more negative of Google. Typically I would have posted my thoughts before now, but like everyone else, I wanted to give Google a chance. Did they have something useful in the works that they simply weren’t ready to unveil?

No, that doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’ll just say it. Google today simply sucks. Their search results aren’t so hot, their services are lame and look terrible, and they’re trying to stuff their various products and advertisements into every nook and cranny that they can find. Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Toolbars, Google Pack, and now they’re jumping into radio to get their ads into that medium.

Why spin it? It’s really all just a bunch of bunk.

Think about this for a moment: How often do you actually use the Google search engine? You may use it exclusively, but how often do you use it?

Thanks to RSS many people receive the news that they want delivered directly to them into the format that they want it. When we hit the ‘net, chances are we know exactly what we’re going after and we most likely have a very good idea of which site we’re loading to get that information. Top this with Google’s less-than-impressive search results and I really have to wonder at their usefulness.

Also, everyone knows that Google is storing all sorts of personal information about their users. If any other company does this then everyone yells “spyware!”. Oh no, they’re tracking the sites that I’m visiting! They’re keeping personal information about what I like, where I live, what I’m searching for, those bast….! Oh, it’s Google? It’s all good.

Why? Why do people let Google get away with this? Google has an entire foundation based on the principles of spyware: data collection. Which sites you visit. Who you are. What shopping items you search for. What you talk about in your email. What your social networking is like. They have it all, they use it to put advertisements in front of us, and yet everyone seems to be just peachy with it.

On the other hand, other companies that do only a third of the data mining that Google does will have Spybot and AdAware thrown at them, their cookies will be blocked, they’ll be labled as spyware and they will be the bane of Internet users everywhere.

I generally agree with that. What I don’t agree with is that Google is somehow absolved of these concerns. That’s nonsense. They’re not. Just why should this company receive special treatment? Everyone is letting them get away with this behavior and their data mining continues to grow.

Yet it goes on. Last I heard, Google continued to scan copyrighted books. Would you like it if a company waltzed in and began giving away your product, or even just parts of your product, unless you specifically opted out for this “service”? Absurd, isn’t it?

Google is lost as far as I’m concerned. They haven’t been a search company for some time now, and in my opinion their search results have suffered for it. Their other services (Talk, Pack, Video, even Dekstop) are lackluster at best. They’re a data mining advertisement company, and frankly, I’m seeing very little value in them these days.

Google is more concerned about getting their toolbars onto your computer than getting you decent search results.

Well, such is my opinion anyway.

Links for this post:

• Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine
• Google Video
• Google Talk
• Google Pack
• Orkut, Google’s social network
• Google Blog Firefox Search Plugin by moi

~Mysk