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Inside Google? Really? Seems More Like Outside

Posted on 22. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Features

Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit organization whose mission is to fight on the behalf of “American consumers and taxpayers” has launch a blog called Inside Google where they intend to keep in check some of the privacy issues that the search engine giant has been encountering recently. From a few of the articles that I have read on the site, Inside Google clearly believes that the folks at Google need to be more open about the way they do business, and one of the issues highlighted is the way their search algorithm is calculated to bring back query results.

This is especially true when looking at the post fuming about the fact that the term “Inside Google” doesn’t come up on the first few pages of a Google Search, yet does when querying Bing. The opposite end of this is perhaps Microsoft should be asked if they are trumping up the Inside Google site while Google is giving it a representative ranking since the Inside Google site is very new; the domain was only registered three months ago and currently has no PageRank.

Plus, there is no update on this post since it was written to point out that searching the term Inside Google appears in the first page of Google Search, at least when I queried it today. Even when done in Incognito Mode or another browser with cleared history. Looks like the “lack of transparency” tag placed on these posts doesn’t apply to Inside Google.

I know that I have not always written rosy things about Google, and they still rank me well, probably because their engine is based on a specific system to return the best results for a query, not by humans directly manipulating search results.  Here are some examples of things I’ve written:

Concerned About Privacy? Scroogle Scrapes Your Searches
Do You Know Why Google Wants to Trade Energy?
Maybe Google Knows Too Much, GoogleSharing Can Help
Google Invests in Recorded Future

Inside Google is based on the foundation that because Google has seventy percent of the United States market of online search it should be investigated because it is a monopoly. But there are other competitors in the search market. In reality if Bing, Yahoo or Ask were actually better search engines than Google, I would use them. But they are not. Hence the reasoning behind the fact that I use Google Search as I’m sure others who read this post would agree.

If serious privacy or security issues arose that Google was not willing to face or to make amends for, I would be all for going after them, as would a great deal of others. In that regard perhaps Inside Google is on the right track with what they are doing but some of these articles posted on the site seem, well, a bit angst driven for some reason.  Is there a motive to why Inside Google feels like they’ve been left on the outside? Possibly because its journalists were formally a part of the once dominant print media industry?

Tags: Ask, Bing, Consumer Watchdog, Google Search, Inside Google, Microsoft, monopoly, PageRank, print media, privacy, search engine rankings, search engine results, security, Yahoo