Do You Trust Google?

What a silly question hey... fancy asking if you trust Google? Everyone trusts the big G. Or so it would seem.

Let's see now, for just a quick sample we trust Google to:

• index our web sites so they can be found
• provide us with many services such as web and desktop search, email, etc
• monitor, calculate, collect and pay our dues from advertisers if we run Adsense
• keep our private details confidential

This list could be fleshed out quite handsomely without even trying too hard, but I think you get the point. We, certainly very many of us, do indeed trust Google. The evidence is in our behavior. How else could you explain what we do in the interactions listed above? Certainly there is abundant evidence that a lot of people place a lot of trust in the big G.

So, if you, like me, are someone with a relationship of trust in Google, tell me this: who is Google? You can correct this to what is Google if you like but a company is much more organic than just a thing, so I'm comfortable asking who is Google?

This is a much more important question than you might at first recognize. Google is not that nice couple of young, clever guys who followed their dream and beat the giants in the search engine world. That makes great copy in various permutations, but Google is now very much a corporate entity.

Some, perhaps even it's CEO (or is it really CEOs?), may feel that Google is theirs and perhaps some type of extension of themselves. The reality is that Google has sold out, umm, I mean been bought, by Wall Street. That is, it is now a public company and has taken on a truely corporate identity and the corporate culture that necessarily comes with that.

Corporate cultures, like any organizational culture, can do very strange things to people. The person one is as an individual, as a spouse or parent or volunteer worker or whatever, is not the same person one is as a corporate employee, at any level in the organization. Remember that.

So by all means go ahead and continue to trust Google. But be smart, keep a watching brief. Treat Google a bit like the ocean - don't turn your back on it. The editor of WebPro News today refers to the Google Print project and asks:

Google is receiving legal support for Google Print. Will this affect the way they index these collections?

The fact is that many of the original supporters of the project which involves Google scanning the total content of several libraries have changed their minds. They no longer think it is a good idea. Essentially, they have lost their trust in Google.

Trust is very important. Sometimes trust is taken for granted and sometimes advantage is taken because of it. Just raising your awareness of the issue of trust may help you to reflect on where yours is placed and why. That is a good thing to do from time to time.