New Line CinemaAs competition gets more fierce, can Google avoid looking like Dr. Evil?SAN FRANCISCO — In 2000, when Google could count its employees by the dozen, it adopted its now famous mantra: Don’t be evil.
Google considered it such a cornerstone of its operating philosophy that it was included in the S-1 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 when it went public.
Now, 12 years later, Google has more than 30,000 employees with annual revenue of $38 billion and growing, and although it still sees itself as a company doing good, its latest actions raise the question: Is Google too big not to be evil?
This month alone Google has been caught up in more privacy debates than I’ve eaten hot meals. There was the mobile apps problem — which also snagged Apple — in which data from mobile phones was being sucked into the hands of just about any developer. Then it was discovered that Google was circumventing privacy settings on Web browsers to track the behavior of consumers.
But wait, there’s more. On Wednesday dozens of state attorneys general sent Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, a letter saying that the company’s latest privacy policy updates, in which it merged all of a user’s data from across Google products, are “troubling for a number of reasons” and “invade consumer privacy.”
I’m not done yet. A product released last month called Google Search Plus Your World integrates Google Plus, the company’s social network, into its search results, seemingly at the expense of its rivals in social search, Facebook and Twitter. This integration seems to go against the company’s founding principles.
When Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin, outlined their plan for Google in their original Stanford University paper, they said search engine bias was “particularly insidious,” adding that competitors often biased their search results to suit themselves, not the user.
Slapping Google Plus into every search result, without much regard of whether it is a better experience for the user, seems pretty biased to me.
Does all this add up to a clear sign that Google has given up on its first principles?
“The past two months have been unprecedented; there has never been anything like it at the company,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the blog Search Engine Land, who has closely covered Google since the company began. “They are a big company, and any big company is always going to have something happen that they don’t expect. But these things keep happening where you can’t even trust their word.”
When I asked Mr. Sullivan if Google was now too big not to be evil, he said, “I don’t think they were ever not evil.”
Google says nothing has changed.
I asked David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, last month if the company had regrets about its repeated privacy stumbles. “We’ve made our share of mistakes like everybody,” he said. “And we learn from them.”
Indeed, what may seem to be stumbles are concerted efforts to compete.
“We have always believed that the perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want,” said Jill Hazelbaker, the director of corporate communications at Google. “That’s why we are focused on building a more meaningful relationship with our users based around identity. We believe that knowing who our users are and the people who matter to them will dramatically improve search.”
Google is more likely than ever to bump heads as it takes on the other giants of technology — Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — which are going for the same goals. Consumers who trusted and even had warm fuzzy feelings for some of those companies when they were upstarts or underdogs are now warier as they get bigger and play rougher. Our distrust of big companies may just be part of the natural evolution of start-ups.
I don’t think Mr. Page is sitting in a large chair in a dark tower, wearing a large pinkie ring and stroking a hairless cat while plotting world domination. (At least I hope he’s not.)
But as Google has grown, and the company sees the threat of others on the horizon, it seems that “do the right thing” may have been paused to prevent itself from fading like a Yahoo or an AOL.