Googling For Gold

In the short time that I have been blogging I have written about Google four times. There is no other company online or even within our culture right now that is more ubiquitous than Google. The company started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin has become our lifeline.

So this essay makes installment Number Five.

Last Thursday it was announced that Google was under pressure from the Justice Department to release search queries that were being made. This is being done in the interest of national security.

And Google politely declined. After all, their corporate motto is "Do No Evil." They contend that the information is not only private in terms of its users, but also proprietary in terms of the company.

Which begs the question of what exactly Google knows about you. And the answer is pretty simple: A lot.

As it turns out, while Microsoft was scrutinized a few years ago for controlling your computer, Google was quietly finding its way into your machine. The result is that Google knows just about everything about you.

If you have a Gmail account, your mail is stored on their server until you delete it. Google "crawls" your mail to try to match keywords for its advertisers, resulting in those text ads you see alongside your mail.

If you use Google's personalized homepage option, you invite the company to track even more about you, such as your interest areas.

And by just simply using Google as a search engine, your every move is still being compiled. It takes only one mouseclick to access your complete Google searching history. Thanks to a cookie placed on your machine, you are identified (at least your machine is) every time you place a query.

Have something to hide? Better be careful, or at least learn how to delete certain things from your Google history.

Author John Battelle, in The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, says that Google represents the "database of our intentions." If we are searching for something, it must be important to us.

Google reveals a lot of these things in its Zeitgeist page. The very pulse of our culture is measured by Google, reflecting what is important to us at a certain time (Joe Pichler was the top query a week ago).

The movie Hoodwinked is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The premise is that there is more to a story than meets the eye. "Before you judge a book by its cover, you've got to flip through the pages," as the investigator says.

Which explains why the Justice Department wants to flip through the pages of Google.

I applaud Google's resistance, even though Yahoo! and MSN have already abided by the feds' requests. There has to be some degree of privacy in our searches, and in this post-911 era there is just a little too much fear and hysteria for me to feel comfortable.

It's one thing that Google even collects all this information. It's quite another when the government steps in and demands that Google fork it over. After all, we choose to use Google in the first place. If we don't want our search queires, email, preferences, etc., being indexed by them, then we don't have to use their services.

But to have your information (however anonymously the government may say it would be parsed) eavesdropped upon by the government is something none of us bargained for.

I have nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I want to live and work in a transparent environment.

Dr "Google Yourself" Gerlich