Is Google already living its past glories? I have had no less than four emails in the past week from people accusing me of being completely wrong about a story.
This is perfectly normal – the great and terrible thing about the Internet is that it lets anyone and everyone join in, including the nutters, wankers and trolls. But in this case it has been seemingly normal people complaining about a news story.
In every case though, the story has been at least three years old. But because it has been Google Alerts drawing their attention to it, they have immediately assumed Google is correct, that the story has only just been published and that it is wrong – to the extent that they write in to complain.
Now Google Alerts is an extremely useful service that lets you put in a keyword and then sends regular emails with links to recent stories with that word in. It has become a regular way for me to see how others report and view the same things that I report on. At last count, I had seven different Google Alerts running.
The problem is that Google Alerts doesn't seem to grasp the idea of years, putting old stories out there as if they are current.
Most amusingly, the blogger Steven Forrest – a secret pseudonym for a press relations man in Texas pretending to be an independent and authoritative online journalist – this week picked up a story from an “ICANN” Google Alert and linked to it. For a man that claims to be a useful source on what the Internet overseeing organisation is up to, you would think that he'd notice that the story on elections was not exactly current. Hoisted on his own petard.
I had an amusing interaction with one of my emailers:
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A Reg reader has the following comments to make on the story Woolworths join Net dunce brigade:
your article is, errrm, not accurate, right?
www.woolworths.co.uk looks to working fine to me.
Or did I miss something?
Simon
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What you've missed is that it was written on 11 August 2000.
Google alerts, right?
Kieren
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Sorry Kieren – you are absolutely correct – Google alerts it was!
Any minute now it will tell me Boo.com is about to launch…. 😉
Simon
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The thing is – and I get shouted at every time I say this – while Google is fabulously useful, there is such a thing as having too much sway, too much power.
If Google slips up even slightly, it has big repercussions. How long will it be until a news story from 2001 causes a stock price to rocket or slump?
Google also stores an enormous amount of material and possesses an incredible amount of both money and power. If anyone wants to look back through their history books for even a second that has only ever meant one thing: corruption, abuse and destruction.
If people are able to relax their brains for a second (and can remember that far back), there was a time when Microsoft was hailed as the smart, innovative, exciting software company that was showing all the lazy monopolists a thing or two.
How long until people speak of Google in the same way we despise yet also admire the Microsoft of today?