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All that's needed to stop taking these guys seriously:
One look at their homepage.

*dons tinfoil hat*

Now Google gets to big to handle, and some say they want to be the information hub of the future (that's why they acquired the Blogger software last week - see the Dutch story on this at I-Marketing.nl), that's why they launched Google News last year and that's why they launch themselves in every country and in every language you can imagine.

So basically, it's a good search engine, but it's a medium. By acquiring and harvesting all sorts of information and by having the power to not include information, they can alter our perspective on the world. Just like any medium we're used to.

I guess when we know of the risks, the possible privacy infringements and informing people about the risks, we can limit some of the items mentioned at Google Watch.

Almost everything they complain about can be switched off, and is usually off by default:

look up google watch using google you'll find it then

or click here

Now, this doesn't necessarily obviate his concerns, but Brandt is a veteran conspiracy-watcher whose obsessions include mind-control projects and secret cults amongst the elite -- and this tendency to indulge in, as Wm. Gibson would put it, "apophenia" is certainly likely to color his view of Google.

To my eye, his concerns display a kind of parochial paranoia: obviously, we're all aware of the uses and limitations of cookies, none of us want to see the cache (or the Wayback Machine) go away, and his comments about Google's "monopoly" and the "[y]oung, stupid script kiddies" who "think Google is 'way kool'" are just inexplicable.

Telling, I think, is his concern about Google having a former NSA developer on staff -- I've worked with a fairly large number of former spooks from the NSA, CIA and civilian contractors, and to suggest that having the NSA on your resume makes you some kind of Coder in Black is absurd. But, of course, YMMV.

...with suspicion over how it actually works

I've skimmed plenty of the below comments and they all seem to agree that this anti-google guy is a goofball.

This whole bizarre Salon article and the followup Slashdot postings seems like a horrible, reprehensible character assassination because someone said something that someone else didn't like (is it too late, and Google has gotten too powerful :-}). If you read the Salon article with a critical eye, you'll see an article slamming someone who actually made a fairly logical and reasonably thought-out complaint about the PageRank system, carefully interspacing comments about his counterculture past with his simple belief that the "democractic" nature of PageRank isn't democratic at all. With wink of the eye comments like "(using the royal "we")" make it very clear what the bias of the author is: Disparage this guy no matter what. They went so far as to make claims on behalf of him (which I can't see in his article), such as "In Brandt's ideal world, if you searched for "United Airlines," you would see untied.com -- a site critical of United -- before you see United's page. And if you searched for Rumsfeld, you'd see NameBase's dossier on him before the Defense Department's site on the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld."" : Funny, but I don't see that in his paper, but instead that appears to be Salon making some rhetorical exaggerations to push his opinion to extremes.

The bizarrest thing is how quickly everyone hopped on the bandwagon to slam this "kook", all based upon the carefully manipulative wording of a Salon article. It is especially disconcerting given that this is the type of guy (questioning "the establishment") that the Slashdot crowd usually hoists on their shoulders and casts as their hero. This Salon article is DISPICABLE, and the methods that the author uses to villainize this guy is a study in evasive techniques (Google's cookie and search tracking doesn't matter, you see, because there are sites that are worse).