Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

An anonymous reader writes "Google, despite 'doing no evil', has managed to make itself a number of enemies recently. That's the subject of an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which looks into the Davids looking to slay Goliath. In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. 'Despite Google's power, few say the company strikes as much fear in them as Microsoft did during the 1990s, when its near-monopoly on computer operating systems earned it the nickname "evil empire." Google's spotty track record with new products -- few outside of search have much of a following -- and intense competition with other Internet companies keeps it a step below. "With Google, there is still choice," said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst for Guernsey Research, "so I'm not sure if the 'evil empire' epithet can be equally applied." But he cautioned that the warning sign will come when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it. How well will Google deal with its customers' problems then?'"

Comments

they won't have to

[froggero1]

when the general opinion of people turns to "google is too powerful and potentially evil" because there is choice, people will just stop using it. There's no lock ins (besides email, but even then, there's redirection, or just telling people that your email has changed).

Microsoft however, way back in the day, when you bought a "Windows PC", you had a couple thousand dollar investment in the company, making it a sudo lock in. The comparison doesn't really apply here imho.

Re:they won't have to

[Arimus]

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community. When enough people with knowledge and capability group up against google, I'm sure they could come up with just as good or better of an alternative. Again though, they'd have to be motivated to do that to google, which will probably only happen if/when the majority of people shift from believing do no evil to don't get caught doing evil, but do it as much as possible.

While I agree the OSS community could produce a search engine as good or better than google in terms of code etc - the biggest killer for any alternative not from a big company is going to be the server resources, bandwidth and all the other infrastructure type elements that require serious bucks to buy and maintain... The best we can hope for would be the OSS community to produce the software and firm like IBM to provide the infrastructure elements... And typing this another issue just occured to me: Google's index has been built up over many years, for any alternative to get to the same level of indexing as google will take a long time to be complete. (Yes, I know the web changes but a certain percentage is going to be static content.)

Re:they won't have to

[Bert64]

On the contrary, i have often found myself forced to use microsoft products against my will.
How many times have you been send a file in a proprietary format, or gone to a non standards compliant website that forced you to use a microsoft browser.
This is why people hate them. Google on the other hand, don't force anything.

Google stands down

[noidentity]

In response to claims that it is too good for its own good, Google is voluntarily scaling back its search engine to version 1.0. This move will allow other search engines to gain a larger share of the search market, and end Google's monopolistic practice of making a good product that makes rational people unable to avoid using. Even though users will have to accept this step backwards in search quality, this is necessary to make it a more even playing field for other companies. Google is also providing a search engine randomizer to further avoid any one engine becoming too dominant.

Failures with delusions of self-entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives

Privacy experts are worried about all search histories and to be fair, Google is the only major search engine that refused to freely surrender search terms. Advertisers are scum who are pissed off that google is a less scummy advertiser than they are. Does anyone give a shit about Hollywood while they continue churning out the same tired crap and why are startups pissed at google?

This 'tides are turning for Google' is getting tired, they have the best search. Wake me up when one of these bozos does something proactive like setting up as serious competition. It's not even comparable to the MS monopoly because Microsoft never had the best operating system and they're still peddling shit. Try 'tides are turning for Microsoft' and I might agree.

This is not like david vs goliath

[gunnarstahl]

This "fight" is about goliath vs goliath.

In the original story david was a person who tried to free his people. He even was willing to put his own life to risk to safe his people.

For some reason or another I don't think that these "davids" have the same altruistic motives...

Yt,

Gunnar

In Soviet Russia...

[daybot]

...Chuck Norris is afraid of Google!