Should we be afraid of Google?
 

All their ducks are in a row. Google Adwords, Google SEO Forums, Google Chrome (the browser I'm using to type this on a webmaster forum), Gmail (the email I use to communicate with webmasters), and Google Analytics (the stats software I use to monitor my sites), Google Webmaster Tools (requires you verify ownership of a site).

They literally KNOW EVERYTHING you're doing. They don't even have to guess. It's right there for them to see. You're playing poker against them, and they're looking at your hand.

Should we be worried? :party-smi

Do you guys honestly think Google is out there to see how you generate your traffic and make your sales, just so they can steal your sales from you? They make more in a day, then any of us webmasters make in a year, they do it for data, they gather general data, to give to their advertisers and then in return sell ad space...

GENERAL DATA is not what your top converting sponsor is, via your email, but what you talk about, do you like certain stuff, etc... They don't actually fit everything up with "Oh yeah, this guy likes African Albino Midget Tranny Amputees, so he must be Josh from Iowa. No it means this is one guy who likes some fucked up shit, let's lump him in with the rest so Advertiser B can target you in the ads in your Gmail and make a sale.

You all bitch, but it's no different than us, except they offer us things worthwhile... You post something and test to see if your surfers like it, oh they do, lets post more of that... Same concept.

Google =

http://mypornolife.com/gfy/cobra_logo.jpg

rise of the cobra in my pants

Google is after me

does the pope shit in the woods...?

no doubt about it.

Worried about what ??? Embrace it. Google is the future. Would you rather a bunch of failfag microsoft applications that actually WOULD fuck you over and function horrible?

ALL HAIL LORD G00GLE.

:thumbsup

You can always move to the google village

interestingly the onion didn't turn up in a search for "google village" I guess someone wasn't amused by the joke...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has attended the last 2 Bilderberg meetings.

seriously.

if they wanted to bank, every single serp in their index would carry an affiliate code to, and overwrite existing affiliate serps for any program on the web. it would be billions.

Google killed my grandpa!

Microsoft proved it couldn't be trusted.

The jury is out on Google. Let's hope they truly "do no evil."

:Oh crap:conehead

You mean like what Yahoo does :)
WG

why are you using google analytics??? I wouldn't put that on any site :2 cents:

I like Google ;) IMO it's the best thing that happened in the internet ever.

i use none of those services

well adwords...sometimes

yeah, lol.

google will soon release their own OS... then we will see that happens...

I'm not afraid.

Stockpiling user data is useless. Will site data taken today be worth anything in 5 years? Think about web usage statistics from 5 years ago, it's not even relevant to what people do today on the web. You couldn't give it away.

They are not collecting data for some huge power play in the future, they simply don't have a plan to make money with anything other than adwords right now.

Bing grew 20% last month. Imagine if they steal 30% of search from Google in the next 18 months. Google would be severely hurt by that as they have no other revenue streams other than adwords. They would have to launch a shit load of free services smothered with their ads to try to recapture those lost impressions and clicks.

Google is also in a shitty position as the leader in a field like search. They can't take any big chances which sets them up to be easily leapfrogged. That's the sucky part about being number one in the internet age.

.. And I for one, welcome our Google overlords.

Don't forget that even if you're a paranoid G hater the company may in the future acquire services that you're using NOW, which will allow them immediate access to your profile data, and presumably logs of past activity/analysis etc. recaptcha is one example, it's on 100,000 sites (or was that 100,000 accounts)

I think your math is a little wrong. 20% of fuck all is still fuck all.

um...what did you just say? :Oh crap

do you have a link?