Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like
Years ago, I worked at a startup that put business listings online. We were trying to create a community, similar to Yelp, but for small businesses.We actually had quite a nice thing going, and were indexed well in Google and other search engines. The community was growing and becoming vibrant.Then, Google Places came out. Not only did they put their places listings at the top of all organic search results, they removed all traces of our site from their index. We couldn't even find our homepage by searching for it! Not even our company name --- it would literally come up no results, even news articles and content not hosted on our site was removed from the index if it had our name in it.What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own.How did I know this? Well, I had a few test accounts that were of completely fake businesses that accidentally made it to prod. They had funny names that would be impossible to exist in the real world. These businesses showed up in Google Places. I checked a few other listings that I knew had been updated by customers, one with a typo, and sure enough they were in places too.Before this we had a good relationship with our Google rep because we used adwords on our site, and Google Analytics. Literally, over night they just stopped responding to us by e-mail and phone. We were cut off, and e-mails and requests to the company went to some robot customer service queue and were closed without being able to speak to anyone.Our search referrer traffic was reduced to almost nothing, our Adsense account was closed, and the business eventually had to close. We considered trying to fight it legally, but after meeting with a lawyer and realizing the reality of the situation I left feeling completely defeated and jaded.How many of these stories are out there? How many people have been silenced by Google, and won't or don't talk about it? You only hear about big time scandals in the news, but I can guarantee there's a huge long tail of destruction in their monopolistic wake.The sad part is I'm forced to use Google products because they are just so big there aren't good alternatives. They are so far ahead. But whenever I do see some Google ad, or post by Larry or Eric about how they are doing god's work over there, curing cancer, working on self driving cars, guarding the world's information or resisting authoritarian, communist governments, I ask myself: are they really that different? Who are they kidding? Maybe they are just so out of touch with the realities of what really made their company successful they can afford to live in such a fantasy land...Is Google evil? Yes, indeed.