Blogosphere, Press Turn Negative on New Google Products
May 9, 2005
Two of Google's latest products are causing some computer industry
professionals to question Google's plans. There is concern about
Google's plans to rate news sources in Google News. And there are
copyright and privacy concerns about Google's new Web accelerator
software.
Google has filed a patent for enhancements to its
news service that allow it to rank stories based on quality and
timeliness. This has raised concerns that Google News will
focus on established media outlets and filter out smaller and
less established news sources. The ECommerceTimes.com explains in a recent article:
Currently, Google's news search returns results based on how recently a story was posted online and how closely the story appears to align with the keywords in related stories. However, the search giant has filed for a patent on an improvement that seeks to filter stories by certain measures of quality as well.
Critics are already noting that the approach might be flawed or at least misleading. Short of having news stories read by experts who could rank them based on quality, the technology will instead rely on pre-determined factors such as the reputation of a news site, how much Web traffic it generates and how old and large the organization that produced the story is in terms of news bureaus and employees.
Google's Web Accelerator speeds up web surfing by preloading
content in the background. However, this practice raises copyright
concerns because Google does not own this content. There are also
privacy concerns because Google can see what people do on these
pages since they are now loaded by Google's servers. Jeff Jarvis
explains in a recent blog post critical of Google's Web Accelerator:
It's one matter when the search engine caches a page you can't get anymore; that's a copyright violation but an all-in-all benign one in the sense that it's only giving you content you could not otherwise see (no different from, say, the web archive).
But it's quite another matter for Google to get in the way of serving current content. This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising.
It also means that Google is copying content on its servers and serving it from there and thus is violating copyright.
And it means that Google is in a position to snoop on data on consumers' usage of sites that Google does not own: That is, Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these "accelerated" pages.
