Bing!

Do Bing and Culi sound familiar to you? If they don’t it seems likely that you are tied to Google, as are the majority of internet users. Some say this is worrying, at best. Enormous amounts of information are collected by the internet company that has been turned into a verb. Countless times people speak of ‘Google it’, instead of just ‘search for it on the internet’.

The information Google collects is not just of the kind you’ll be able to find on Wikipedia. Involve private information and preferences and you are getting much warming in defining what they’re after. But saying ‘what they are after’ has a tendency to overestimate or make an apocalypse  of what is actually happening. That’s not yet necessary, even if keeping a close eye on what is happening would be wise.

You won’t be able to wave it all away by saying that Google is just a search engine. For a search engine they have quite a lot of acquisitions, diverse and not very cheap, as you can see here. Its webby fingers are all over the place. As long as they’re only meddling with internet affairs people are unlikely to worry too much but in recent years the boundary has become blurred, and no one seems to know where the real world starts and where the digitalized one stops.  Maybe ‘blurred’ is already the wrong word and the difference is merely a linguistic one, which I think more likely.

Take a look at journalism and advertisements for instance. They are all tied to this new-age medium. Newspapers delivered to your house every morning are not extinct, though numbers have been falling for years. And with those falling numbers come falling advertisement revenues. Websites have usurped a part of this journalistic task, as we can see by the numerous variants that display news such as blogs, YouTube, CNN’s I-report and more. That is not bad, not at all. It only makes news more accessible, at any time and place. This has not gone unnoticed to the market of course, which has pumped vast amounts of money into internet-activities. With money comes dependence, and with dependence often influence. And that is one of the aspects in which Google is almost ubiquitous. Familiar Google-ads are all over the place. And you might have noticed they’re not the same everywhere. Have you ever wondered why some ads come so close to the actual content of the site you are looking at? They know what they are doing at Google’s bureau.

They certainly do. Not only is their number of visitors extremely high, they also have a huge database of websites. Some new search engines could be heard saying that ‘their results would be more numerous and better’.  This should lead us to the conclusion that apparently not every site ends up in a search engine. No surprise maybe, but good enough to come up with another question: Why and on what grounds does a site end up in Google? It should be a ‘good web page’ is the answer.

I’m not sure however, that Google should decide what and how a good website should be. Such authoritative judgments require omnipotent wisdom or one hack of a table of reference. And this constitutes our problem: A monopoly. It other words: Google pulls the strings. If a site does not conform to its ideas of what a good website should be like, it’ll be excluded from the game. I don’t think that’s good for competition and innovation. It’ll be like entering a store in search of a new T-shirt, finding only green ones with spots. And even though those spots might have different spatial locations and colors on each t-shirt, we’ll still get the feeling we have not much of a choice to make. Likewise with the internet: We might want all the websites to be websites, but we don’t want all of them to be alike in looks, content and fashion. No border controlled by an officer in Google uniform.

We could compare this to Microsoft’s Windows. Everyone knows it, most of us use it. But not because we have explicitly chosen to use Windows, at least not for most of us, only because we have never reasonably considered an alternative. We know Apple primarily for their I-pods, not for their I-Macs: Their share on the computer market is unlikely to even make Microsoft’s throne wobble. We have also seen the European Commission fight Windows for its implementation of Media Player, Internet Explorer and other self-made programs into its system. As long as no obstacles were placed on their route, Microsoft could shamelessly advocate its own software. Many accepted this and never downloaded or used alternatives. This stifles innovation, because here a monopoly is no longer the result of a superior product, but of a prior-achieved position and cleverly abusing it by making it virtually impossible for competitors to get customers.

You might say here that, since Microsoft and Google are companies, they should do as they please. After all the products are theirs, if customers do not want to use them they can search for an alternative. And to a certain extent this should indeed be the case. But with power comes responsibility. They got their power because of their superior product, and when it is turning its back on that quality in exchange of a better market-position, we will have all the reasons we need for complaining.

The situation is not as bad as it is with Microsoft yet. Google supports many open-platform and open-source projects, which eases the pain a lot. Even if not wholly for unselfish reasons, it at least gives the impression that it does not aim at preventing any kind of progress. If anything it wants to speed up that very process. Even so, it’s a good thing that Culi and Bing are trying to enter the battle and put up a fight. They might even be good enough, despite the fact that so far they all run into the same wall. Google obtained such strategic power that when alternatives arise people merely nod approvingly, but then turn back to the site they always use when something needs finding.