Google has me comfortably numb

I really enjoyed a comment by mlankton on my earlier post “Living in the Google Biosphere: The dreaded paid link”. In it, mlankton said:

I’m with Google on this one. They made the better search engine. They made the yardstick for sites to measure themselves with. They have an interest in serps and pagerank meaning something, and paid links undermine that.

That is awfully hard to disagree with. I think that Google has made such incredible strides at making the Internet more useful, more enjoyable and more profitable for so many.

However, there is a natural byproduct to all of these wonderful things. Google has progressively gained leverage over website owners and we’ve reached the point where they are able to influence our behavior with implicit threats.

I guess we can always rank in Windows Live..

It is of course, their game and they can set the rules.

When one player in a common marketplace becomes so powerful that they leave people with few practical options but to play the game their way it might not always be bad, but I think it is always something we should watch closely.

Of course, I’m still willing to play Google’s game myself as so many website owners are — but the fact that they can exert so much pressure on the marketplace at large to help maintain their supremacy in search and prevent dilution of their aging algorithms is a little scary. I’ve been developing for the Internet since the early 90’s and remember a time when links were just links.

In some aspects, I think by turning links into a commodity, Google has destroyed the Internet in order to save it.

Comfortably Numbed by Google AdSense

But would I trade all the great benefits of life with the big G to go back to the Internet of the pre-Google days?

Not now. Not yet…