The charge has been made so many times that it’s beginning to sound like a broken record: Google is too big for its own good.
The latest example of Google’s total online dominance is the lesson learned by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Wale’s “dared” to challenge Google by creating a massive open source search engine, Wiki.com. However noble Wale’s intentions though, it was simply not meant to be, and the project lasted just one year before going under.
The goal of Wiki.com was an interactive search engine, which used the power of the crowd to categorize the Web in a more “human” way than Google’s complicated computer algorithms could ever manage. Upon its launch, wed experts praised the concept behind Wiki.com, and some went so far as to call it the “Google killer.” Evidently, they spoke too soon.
For better or worse, Google is going to be the dominant search engine online for many years into the future. The company’s massive online advertising revenue and stable of nearly 20,000 highly qualified employees make it virtually unstoppable to those who would attempt to “democratize” the Web with open source technology.
But when upstarts like Wiki.com go under, a great deal of Web innovation sinks with them. And that is the real problem with Google’s unchecked dominance online — we have gotten to the point where what we think of as “the Internet” is in reality “Google’s version of the Internet.” And unsurprisingly, these are two very different things.
As Google has solidified its online power by adding now ubiquitous features such as Gmail, Google Documents and YouTube, the rest of us find ourselves living in a 24/7 Google world, and being directed around the web in a way that is in Google’s best interest, but not necessarily ours.
In the early “wild west” days of the Web, there was a chaotic charm to Web surfing. You never knew what you’re going to find or where you’d find it. In some ways, the Internet was much “larger” back then, as simple linking strategies such as “web rings” made it practical to explore odd, random sites of varying quality from all over the world.
But because Google has homogenized the Web to a great degree, most of us now find ourselves visiting the same Google-friendly sites over and over again. In fact, the term “Web surfing” isn’t particularly applicable anymore. Surfing involves a certain amount of chaotic randomness. Going online these days offers little of that same chaotic charm, and little hope of discovering web sites that do not mesh with Google’s view of what the Web should be.
The Web has certainly “grown up” under Google’s rein– but along the way it has lost a great deal of the “childishness” that made it so attractive to begin with.
