Google is, for many, something of a conundrum. On the one hand, its plethora of free services and its reputation for efficiency seem to show continued allegiance to its unofficial slogan, "Don't Be Evil". On the other hand, every so often, the corporate giant will do something that attracts serious criticism.

For example, in January 2006, Google agreed to filter thousands of keywords specified by the People's Republic of China (PRC), including "Tiananmen" and other politically sensitive words and phrases, on the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn. Critics have claimed that this decision undermined the ideal of freedom of information that Google seems to champion. Google have responded to the criticism by arguing that the search engine would again be blocked in China entirely, as the site was in 2002, if they failed to comply with the suggestions of the PRC. Users are informed of restrictions on keywords when they attempt to search, and Google does not plan on sharing details of users who search for restricted terms with the government. Google claims that it does not censor content, but blocks some content in accordance with local law, as it does with DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests in the US. Most Chinese internet users did not object to the decision.

YouTube, a video sharing site and a subsidiary of Google, removes content which it considers to break its terms of service, including material which violates copyright, pornographic material, or videos which depict "hate speech", gratuitous violence or illegal acts.

Google has also been criticised from excluding certain sites from its news searches, including sites critical of Islam, and sites critical of US policy, such as uruknet.info. Some have claimed that Google also censors advertisements containing negative comments about China, but not about other countries or groups. Many users of the Google Maps service were horrified when the site reverted to images of Louisiana taken before Hurricane Katrina.

There is much paranoia about Google among some internet users. Google's long expiry dates on cookies have been one source of worry; another is the tracking of IP addresses (although most servers do exactly the same thing). The AdWords advertisements that appear alongside emails on Gmail have caused some to complain of privacy violations, although Google assures its users that no human being reads their emails. Some internet users believe that Google is storing information about individual web users and could divulge this information to third parties, including governments. But it seems always to have been Google's policy to protect the privacy of its users as strongly as possible, despite the fact that it does indeed record anonymous statistics about internet use, with its Google Toolbar and in other ways.

The PageRank algorithm has been called undemocratic by many, since, rather than ranking pages on a merit-based system, it bestows upon the most popular sites on the internet the power to anoint others as "important". Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine argues, however, that "Something a vast number of people acknowledge as a source for a specific kind of information probably is." The possibility of manipulation of Google's algorithms is perhaps a greater concern, but Ulanoff says that he has seen little evidence of this happening.

Google supporters have argued that many of the "crimes" Google is accused of are not those of Google alone, but of search engines and other leading web services in general. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Google's monopoly on the search engine industry makes it a target for libertarian and anti-establishment parties to take pot-shots at it. Many of the concerns raised may well be important to bear in mind: privacy and freedom of information will continue to be major topics of controversy and discussion over the next few years. But is this a reason to boycott the site, as an increasing number of web users are beginning to do?

Boycotting Google is a brave move for a website. It's possible to stop Google and other search engines from crawling your site by adding a small file called robots.txt which instructs the spiders to pass over your site. You can be pretty sure that no commercial site will be doing it, however; it would be tantamount to marketing suicide, since a vast proportion of traffic to most websites comes through search engines, and Google in particular.

Personal sites such as blogs and other information-dissemination sites could boycott Google, but to do so would mean hiding their message from most of the internet-literate world. I found all of the websites I used to write this article via Google, including the embittered and often inaccurate Google Watch; the irony wasn't lost on me. To boycott Google is to lose whatever online foothold you might have.

Users have also been boycotting Google by switching to alternative search engines. But is anyone else any better? Personally, I find the minimalist, graphic advertisement-free environment of the Google search engine far more conducive to productivity than the wild, bright colours of Yahoo! and other sites. What is more, the few who choose to go elsewhere are unlikely to sway the tide of users who rely solely on Google for their search results. Those who choose to boycott Google are putting principles before their online success, and perhaps this is to be admired. But the sacrifice may well be in vain.

By Natalie Catchpole

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