Are Google Evil?

Google Are Evil

Anyone who's read this blog will know that I think a lot of my friend who runs the Celtnet website. Partly this is due to the fact that he married my friend... but mostly it's due to the fact that almost every cent he makes from his website is given to Liberian refugees here in Dakar, Senegal. In fact, he funds almost 10 of the refugees' children to come to school.

All this money comes from his website, which he has been working on for over 3 years to become a success. It's over $1000 a month, which allows 10 children here to get an education. And just so you know how important this is, Liberians are English speaking but Senegal is a Francophone country. In the main it's women and children who escaped to Senegal. But without French and a French education the children can never be accepted into society, can never make an income and can never have a chance of returning home. The Celtnet Website is giving these people a chance to re-build their lives and to make themselves a future.

This is done through information and the provision of recipes. Just check out the Celtnet Recipes link if you don't believe me. Then, last Friday 6th February the Celtnet site began to vanish from the SERPS (Search Engne Results PagesS). This is done due to a penalty for violating Google's terms and conditions. Now, if someone on the net is violating these terms it may be fair for them to be penalized... we would all agree with that...

But, here's where it gets interesting. Google owns over 70% of the web by being the predominant search engine. They deliver the majority of a site's traffic. As a result they have a majority position on the web and should be regulated. Now, Google themselves have a current campaign for 'net neutrality' revealing the ISPs who throttle back on a website's results delivery. But what of Google themsleves, what of their 'net neutrality'.

The problem with Google's terms and conditions is that they can 'throttle back' on any website by giving them a penalty without even telling the website about it. The webiste may have transgressed Google's terms and conditions.... but the mighty G does not have to tell the website owner about this or the action they are taking. So, one morning any webiste owner can just wake up to find out they have no traffic... and this is what happened to Celtnet.

On Friday Ferbruary 6th 2009 the site's traffic began to dissappear. Rather than being on page 1 of Google's search results pages suddenly vanished to page 20 or worse. A good example being the site's Liberian Recipes pages which vanished. Or even the sites's Welsh Recipes now vanished from page 1 and slowly falling down the SERPs. The point is that the owner of the site is Welsh and his wife is Liberian so these pages represent the largest collections of Welsh and Liberian recipes on the Web. All things being equal, they should be number 1 for both search terms.... but now they've vanished off the web.

All this is Google's doing. Now, this is not to say that people should not be punished for transgressions of Google's terms and conditions. But, Google's actions were taken unilaterally. No information was provided to the site's owner as to why the site was being punished by Google and no grace period was given to fix the problem.

Google's motto may be 'don't be evil' but they are truly being evil in this case. There may well be a transgression of what Google considers good. But I know that this website is written by one person and everything on it is done by him. All the recipes added to the Celtenet Recipes site are written by hand to be unique. And isn't that what Google says they want... unique content?

The site isn't even making any money for itself but for others. To check out what the site is all about, go to the One Million People Campaing page. And just remember that this action by Google is removing over $1000 from this site's revenue every month.

What's being complained about here isn't Google's actions, but how they've gone about it. They've taken a website, removed it from web visibility (without telling the owner why) and are now making African children suffer.

Even worse, the only way for the webmaster to get his rankings back is to file a 're-inclusion request' with Google. This is a form, basically saying 'I screwed up'... The only way to get back into Google's good grace is to sign up to their webmaster tools and to submit one of these requests. Only, the request is an acknowledgement that the website did something wrong.

Basically, for re-inclusion into Google you have to sign the form saying what you did wrong and promising you will never do anything again.... The problem being that if you are not a large website you may never have any clue what you did wrong because Google don't tell you... And, unless you know what you did wrong you will not get back into Google's good graces.

So, if you are a small website owner doing your own thing, producing good and novel content you may never know what you did wrong and you may never get back into Google. My friend is thinking of throwing in the towel. After all 3 years is a lot of work for a personal website, especially if you are giving the money away to others...

As a result of Google's actions 10 children here will not gain an education beyond March and they will lose future. This is all Google's doing....

So, are Google evil or not?

I would say that they are very evil. Their actions are shrouded in mystery. If they can take any website off the web for no reason (at least for not giving the website owner a reason or a chance to fix things) then their actions are very evil. They are ruining lives....

But, what do Google care. The webmaster in question is in the UK and the childrens' lives they are ruining are in Africa. And that's the problem... the net is global and no company should have the power to pull a website and make it vanish. If 'net neutrality' is a reality then that should apply to Google as well and they should be regulated like the global monopoly they really are.