should we be suspicious of google?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." - Google's mission statement

I would be a lot more comfortable if it was Google's mission to assist in creating the technologies that will free the world's information. As it is Google has simply asserted that it wishes to become the monopolistic broker for what is fast becoming planet earth's most valuable resource. Attached to the information Google wants to organise and serve to us is, potentially, almost all the value (of any kind) tied up on the planet. This isn't so hard to believe when you see the proliferation of gadgets, and monitoring gadgets, everywhere, and their increasing connectivity to open networks.

I'm an optimist, and I don't think Google can survive much longer behaving in the way it does. Just as I believe Microsoft is a dying monster, serving poorly crafted computing products to the illiterate computing masses out there, I believe Google will eventually go the same way, except I think Google will probably have left a much more valuable legacy in terms of experience, lessons learnt and contribution to the internet and activities undertaken thereon.

What we need is decentralized, open-source search. The days of concentrating this kind of resource in the hands of a single company really has to be over. If we stop kidding ourselves this is clearly the most sensible, and the only possible, way forward. One Google is a single point of failure for one of the most important resources on the internet.

Distributed search composed of hundreds of flavours of search engine scattered all over the planet, even on people's home computers and househouse appliances etc. would be a much stronger system, and would in my opinion have the potential to be a lot more trustworthy than our current centralized solutions.

Check out lucene/nutch. I will soon, it seems to have developed a little in the last few months.

Maybe we'll all be saved.

Google Maps and GMail and all the various Google-Wows are surely amazing, but not as scary as what they all inevitably point to.

So where does that leave all the big internet portals?

In my mind it has to be something along the lines of: decentralize-and-open-your-source or bust. There's no reason why one company can't produce a bulk of the technology and even benefit in a big way financially from it, but I think in this day and age it mustn't do it behind closed doors.

Security and trust demand it, and morality is begging for it.

Roll on the next few years!