The privacy issue came to a head last week, as Google said it plans to resist a subpoena from the U.S. Justice Department, seeking information about searches. The Justice Department is looking to reverse a court ruling claiming that Child Online Protection Act anti-pornography laws are un-constitutional. Google won praise from privacy advocates for standing up to the Justice Department.
Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo went along with the subpoenas, saying that, since the information was aggregated search queries, no personal information would be conveyed to the federal government and therefore there were no privacy issues involved.
Google faces the perception of bias as a result of its recently consummated deal to buy 5% of AOL for $1 billion. Google always has prided itself on being neutral, a level playing field for advertisers to display their ads. But with the AOL deal to display banner ads and to directly sell Google search advertising, the search engine company opens itself up to more criticism.
"They've mounted a public-relations campaign to counter the perception of bias, but the perception is definitely out there," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.
And there's the very real fact that unscrupulous people can manipulate Google searches, leading to a distrust of results. The British newspaper The Guardian successfully influenced the Google search index with a spoof of a footwear product. At the start of the experiment, there were more than 11,500 research results on the term "eco-friendly flip flops." Within 2 days of the spoofers creating the site, Google discovered it, but ranked it at the lowest 100 pages of search results. But within days, by the end of the experiment--during which the newspaper used a number of relatively low-tech techniques for manipulating the results--the spoof site had rocketed to the top place of the other 11,500 sites.
Lack Of Focus
