guerilla_news pointed out a link to Google-Watch-Watch.org which itself is a watchdog for Google-Watch which is a watchdog for Google.With me so far? Has the stupidity begun to sink in?
Google-Watch, loyal fucktards that they are have a few problems with google. First, the page rank algorithm represents how popular things are, instead of what quality they have. Second, Google has a monopoly of 75% on outside referalls- ie. 75% of the time, you find a new site through google. Google also indexes phone-numbers, and additionally, it still indexes websites with your phone number on them! Google *gasp* cache's web pages, and unless a webmaster uses a "no-cache" meta-tag, their page is included in that cache.
Okay, first off, since we don't have an algorithm capable of determining the quality of a site, you're going to have to find a way to approximate. Since everyone is going to think it should work one way, or another, you let them vote- by tracking the link backs. The more a site is linked to, the more popular it is, hence, the more likely it is people want to see it.
As for Google's monopoly, I have yet to see Google doing anything monopolistic. They index other search engines, and make no attempts to keep you from using other search engines. They're simply popular. Deal.
As for the phone numbers, Google only indexes publicly available information. And hey, guess what, your phone number and address fall in the category of public information. You can try and make it harder for people to find, but it's still available. It isn't Google's job to protect your privacy.
As for caching, I would say that caching is a valuable service. On many occasions I've found information that I needed _then_ while the site was down for maintainance, or the page I needed had been removed. There are some copyright concerns, granted, and I wouldn't mind a web-standard along the lines of the Creative Commons RDF licenses being expanded to more restrictive licesnes- which spiders can recognize and choose not to cache.
They also go on to lambaste bloggers- which, guess what- on that point, they're right. Bloggers throw a tremendous deal of noise into google's ranks (and make GoogleBombs). But Google has already announced that they're modifying their algorithm to ignore large blogging sites when calculating rank.
Overall though, they're a funny bunch of fucktards.
