Wow. It’s like Luke Skywalker listening to the Emperor make his case in Return of the Jedi and, instead of telling him to go bake a cake, he says:
“Well, when you put it that way, it does make a lot of sense. I mean, I’d get to work with my dad, which is pretty cool (except he can be kind of a jerk sometimes). Alright, why not? Dark Side it is.”
“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s credo. Or at least it used to be. Recently, it seems like they’ve thrown that out with the trash, along with the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett’s ship in Empire Strikes Back.
For the record, here’s four Dark Side things Google has done lately…
One—
Recently Google broke its own rules regarding paid sponsorships and had to censor itself in its own listings. I personally thought the whole thing was hilarious (I don’t have anything against Google, I just thought it was a funny situation).
Basically, a blogger that Google had hired (through subcontractors) included a direct link to Google’s website in his blog post (a no-no). We can’t really blame Google for that because it’s not entirely within their control, but it’s a mistake nonetheless. Google dinged itself for 60 days in organic search rankings for the gaff.
The funniest part to me was that they were saying things like they’d have to monitor the things that Google put up on its website and stuff like that. So like one Google dude yelling over the cube to another Google dude, “Dude, don’t put that up.”
Two—
At the end of last year, Google representatives scraped the client database of a small company running a business listing website in Kenya (to help get Kenyan businesses online and boost the poor nation’s economy), then used it to try to steal the company’s customers.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, not-yet-evil Annakin Skywalker.
The Google reps systematically (over months) scraped Mocality’s client list (manually, which is even more Darth Vader-ish), called the clients saying Google was working with Mocality (not true) and tried to sell them websites.
Read the rest in the follow-up to this post, And the Google List Goes On…
