Google scumware?

If you know your meta tags or are involved in SEO you probably remember the debacle around the MS Smart Tags. The tags were another “brilliant” idea from Gates & Co to “improve” the user experience through the auto-insertion of links/content into websites when view using IE. Fortunately MS offered an “opt out” clause via a meta tag and eventually shelved the idea (more or less).
Meanwhile “back on the ranch” Google has grown to conquer and dominate the search engine market – and possibly a number of other related markets. It has done all this whilst maintaining its “squeaky clean” corporate image. No matter what Google has done nobody seems to think of them as an “evil” corporation.
Google is constantly toying with new and exciting ways to manage knowledge and its related data, in every imaginable format. Its use of technology has changed the way we view things, read news, advertise and even organise our files.
This perception may change.
The latest version of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer adds a new, and quite disturbing, feature “autolink”. The change log for toolbar refers to it innocently as ” AutoLink feature to turn street addresses into links to online maps”. It fails to mention what it can do to other content. The addresses are only the starting point. ISBN are converted to links to amazon, while other content “hooks” are pushed towards other partner companies. Of course it is possible to argue that this “enriches” the end user experience. But does it? Where do you draw the line between enriching an end user’s experience and perverting the web author’s content?
We spend money on Google adwords to drive traffic to our site and increase sales (obviously). What happens when Google sign a deal with one of our competitors? Will keywords and phrases related to our core business be morphed into links to a 3rd party? That would be perverse.
For other types of companies this kind of modification could spell financial disaster, as Scott Granneman, Steve Rubel and others demonstrate.
In typical web fashion people have already found ways of circumventing the perversion.
So will Google be able to maintain its “squeaky clean” image? Only time and the public’s opinion will truly decide.
Personally I feel quite disappointed, but maybe I was being too naive.