Google: This site may harm you

Posted on January 31, 2009 in Uncategorized

At the recent SYP AGM, I was amused to hear Amazon described as a ‘monopoly’.  As a former employee of Amazon, I have mixed feelings about the company, as I had both good times and bad times there.  Generally, I think I prospered there, and they are currently selling my debut novel, A Fame of Two Halves, at a very good price.   But my view is tempered by the fact that I believe that there is an even more dangerous monopoly out there.  Amazon, after all, is just a retailer, in a marketplace that is still very competitve.  Google, on the other hand, as the leading search engine, arguably controls access to the world’s knowledge, which is far more valuable.

  My fear of their power was the reason why I was so angry this afternoon when I tried to access the SYP site via Google.  I was alarmed to see a very prominent warning message which informed me that the SYP site could harm my computer.  My panic subsided after a few moments when I discovered that the BBC website had the same error message attached to it.  Oh, and, in a very humorous aside, I must report that Google’s own website had the same error message attached to it, which will make the company look even more foolish.  A report on CNET suggests that "this problem was caused by an outage at StopBadware.org. If so, Google needs to rethink its failsafe strategy for this data source".  I’m glad to announce that things have gone back to normal, and that Google no longer regards the SYP as being a menace to anyone’s computer.

  When Google first came along, I loved them, as they gave high rankings to my literary website Authortrek, and awarded sites that had the best content, and were generally far less snooty about what they listed than AltaVista.  However, a decade down the line, I now dislike Google immensely, for simultaneously downgrading the search rankings for all of Authortrek’s subsidiary pages overnight with no explanation.  They’re also incredibly difficult to contact.  I succeeded on contacting them and complaining about this on a previous occasion, and the ranking of my subsidiary pages were restored for 6 months.  However, I am tired of having to go through this process, tired of Google effectively denying passing visitors to my site, tired of feeling powerless at Google’s expense, so tired that I am now letting the site run down, especially since I never got enough revenue through my Google ads.  These Google ads are also not what they’re cracked up to be – if I search for the amateur author ‘Peter Reiling’ on my site, I don’t expect to see adverts for ‘Garden Railings’, but this is what Google delivers to me.  I got so fed up with Google a few years ago that I wrote a poem about them, which neatly expresses my feelings about the company:

To Canoodle Google

I loved you to bits
When you first started
Giving me a hit.

With every beholden click,
I gave you a golden tick.

I didn’t know who you were at first
But you came through
When the bubble burst.
And soon everyone on Earth
Knew who you were.

You rode through the surf
And you gave birth
To many pages of worth.

But now everything seems to be worse.
Going public seems to have been a curse.
It was you who said, honey,
That you could make money
Without being evil.
Do you even care
About Tiananmen Square?

I gave up everything for you,
And now you treat me like poo.
I never thought I’d see the day
When you’d make me pay
To be the number one on your list.

You make me regret
That we had ever kissed.

You used to be my best mate,
We even went on several dates.
But now my love is late,
And has turned into hate.

You look at me with baby eyes,
But now I see they’re full of lies.
You bend down for a kiss
But I no longer wish
To canoodle Google.

Kevin Mahoney is the SYP Web Content Editor, and the author of the novel, A Fame of Two Halves, which fortunately does not contain any of his poetry.