Im studying Interactive Media. And for a course i've recently read a lot of things about 'Search Engine Marketing'.
Of course this immediatly lead to Google. And i started reading about google as an organisation. I was horrified, The search engine we all once loved so dearly, has become a monster.
Some facts:
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.[5] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.[6] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.[7] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.[8] Source: wikipedia
Ever since the start of Google in 1996, google has now taken over 50+ companies and concepts, in several segments of several markets. Amounts paid vary a lot, Some huge aquisitions are Youtube for USD 1.65 Billion, and Ad-tycoon Doubleclick for USD: 3.1 Billion. Just to name two, of the most well know takeovers.
Funny fact, even with all those companies take over, 80% of google's profit still emerges from advertising. One of they're original products. (AdSense etc). This immense buying of companies. had lead to the sentence: 'Whom will Google buy next?', A question asked on several logs on the intarweb.
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In my opinion, google's becoming dangerous. Yes, a horiffic statement, i know. Let me explain.
Google is getting too big to function properly. They want in on everything, and they are in on everything. They know everything about us, not just on the search platform (which will give them a great deal of info about every person using it, and yes ofc they are logging data.) but also on several other markets. They have gotten companies whom are active in online payment (giving them info about our purchases), and a lot more area's. If they combine these streams of data, they can actually make a pretty detailed character profile on anyone. And regardless of what they're saying, or what the law is restricting them to, they are doing this.
Recently even the CIA approached Google, they want google to share it's database with them. Which imo, is a huge privacy breach.
But not only this. Being such a huge company atm, has lead to them being less secure, and making more mistakes, which have a pretty large impact.
Example given:
The myspace debacle.
This i've read about a couple of weeks ago, some i'm a little rusty on it. Tried to find some info on the matter, but failed. Anyways, this is what i remember. Google had placed links te people's myspace account on whether facebook or youtube, and didn't secure these links. Account info, due to this, got sent in the URL while loading the pages, a lot of accounts were hijacked that day.
furthermore.
There Desktop addon has had several security leaks.
The news business is scared to death, for google.
The search engine allowed site's to be hacked through it in several ways.
I'd come up with some more examples, but i'm at work, and loads of things are blocked.
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In my opinion, google is becoming more and more of a risk to the outside world. The focus is not on they're search engine anymore, they're becoming bigger every day.
I think people will eventually go from loving google, to hating it's guts. And so they should.
Google should've stayed small(er), and should've kept on perfecting it's original products, giving us the best stuff on the internet. My 2 cents.
/discuss and add/improve this huge read where needed.
