I am thinking maybe we need to create a “neighborhood watch” of sorts for the online space. Every day I learn of something shady, hypocritical, or downright monopolistic that they do. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to site and write down every time I hear of them doing something “evil.” For example, just today I saw two posts from some of my favorite bloggers that showed what Google has been up to.

First up is Aaron Wall on Hypocritical Nature of AdSense

Next up was Slightly Shady on Google Creating Its Own Internet

Seoker.com on Google Toolbar Steals 401 Messages

Here are my two cents on both issues:

UPDATE: The fine Folks of Google Horror Stories  sent me a note letting me know that they are designed to serve as a Google Watch Dog. Feel free to post your horror story there.

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Well the jury is out. Craig Hordlow Mostly SEO blog had conducted a controlled experiment to see whether Google followed links inside your Gmail. You can check out his blog for the details of the experiment.

Unfortunately, it looks like Google does not index pages through Gmail. I guess I have nothing to bitch about here. If anyone has noticed something to the contrary from gmail please let me know.

What the hell is going on in the search world. Microsoft is trying to take over Yahoo! At first I had the same reaction as everyone else, Microsoft the kind of Monopolies making a bid on the number two player in the US search share OH NO. Well the more I thought about it and the more I read, the more I realized that this would not be such a bad thing.

This move by Microsoft will help create a valid competitor to Google. If you do not believe me explain why their stock dropped to a four year low? Google is scared it finally realized that it can’t keep up with the facade of being your friend while slowly creeping into every aspect of your online use, not to mention offline.

Google is getting scared so they released this official statement on Google’s position on Microsoft and Yahoo

Lets read this official statement and see how hypocritical it is.

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Google failed the citizenship test. Let me explain how I found this out.

The past few night I have been helping my girlfriend study for her citizenship test. She has been here for over 8 years, but with the political landscape we decided its best to make it official. (ironically enough it turned out that she technically is already a citizen due to a law change).

I used the booklet that they distribute to study for the exam to quiz her to see what things she did not know and ran the same questions through Google.
I used the Google and “I’m Feeling Lucky” to see what answers would come up.

Here is how Google did on naturalization test;

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When I say the algorithm, I am not just referring to the Google. In our society we have evolved to create algorithms in order to help us make decisions and choices. Some examples are when you check out Gotcha Capitalism on Amazon you will notice that on the bottom not only does an algorithm pair another book to compliment it, the algorithm even recommends books based on other’s shopping behavior. Another example is Pandora where based on your musical taste other music is recommended.

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