Thank you for replying. For 5.5 years I managed AdWords accounts and seeing what Google was doing there is why I don’t trust them. I’ve been compiling issues with what Google does and writing about them for years now. If you are open to learning why I consider them the most dangerous entity to our personal freedoms including freedom of choice you can start with the post at http://GrowMap.com/google-fairy.

When I say I want ALL the information what I should more accurately have said is that I want to read alternative viewpoints. I do not want to have everything pre-filtered for me so that all I see is the party line closest to the profile Google thinks is who I am.

If you realized how much “personalization” is going on in search results – and even worse – how social proof is being manipulated to control public opinion – you could better understand my point of view.

A good place to see this is by looking at content on major sites related to vaccinations or creationism versus evolution. Go to CNN posts about the flu and the majority of comments are from people totally convinced that vaccinations work. Many of them are even in favor of forcing everyone to take them. I was quite surprised that comments in a similar story on Yahoo! News were primarily anti-vaccination.

While some of that is due to people reading what agrees with their belief systems, much of it is manipulated. The most obvious example I’ve seen of that was on Hulu. Although the movie The Case for Christ had 300+ comments which were almost all positive about the movie, on the first page of comments 8 out of 10 were negative.

Originally that movie could easily be found on Hulu when you searched for it. Later it did NOT show up in search results on the site itself, but you could find it using a search engine. Shortly thereafter, all the original comments were deleted and there were only a handful of new comments.

What is happening is that alternative points of view are being pushed down in the results and the two polarized mainstream belief positions promoted. For now, you can still find other viewpoints IF you dig really deep into the results – often as deep as 20+ pages – but off and on I’m seeing Google show only ten pages of results. I just screen captured a search yesterday to post about that because you can only get to the first ten pages even though it says clearly there are 450,000+ results returned.

This does not surprise me. Google’s CEO made it quite clear that they intended to “clean up” the Internet “cesspool” by favoring big brands (the quote about that is on SEOBook – I can provide the link if it doesn’t turn up in search – wasn’t sure more than one link in a comment would work).

Might they not also want to “clean up” whatever does not conform to the beliefs they want us to have? I believe that IS their plan and I have seen clear evidence of it. I wrote a post about Food Rights and it took me three times longer than it should have to find supporting documentation even though I was searching for both the question AND the answer I wanted to find. When the results are limited to 10 pages I won’t be able to find them at all.

I agree that everything is curated, but originally most libraries and bookstores would stock what people wanted to read – not only what the person in power permits. We are moving toward a situation where it will be easy to control what is available and literally rewrite history on the fly. Amazon already reached out and deleted books from Kindles that people had paid for – and that they did this to copies of 1984 and other “subversive” books made that all the more obvious. What if they instead “edit” digital copies of books? How many would notice? (Very few!) Do we really want to allow Google to “curate” free speech?

Yes, they have a monopoly. Yes, for many sites 65% to as high as 98% of their traffic comes directly from Google. I consider that a serious threat to their survival and our freedom of choice – and one we as bloggers can reverse. All we have to do is encourage people to move away from handing Google all our time and attention instead of toward giving them even more of it.

We need to be saving links (because later we won’t be able to find them in search engines.) We should be making connections with people and taking those discussions to places that are under OUR control – not theirs.

I understand your feelings about trusting a large corporation, though your feelings about it are certainly more passionate than mine!

Feelings aside, my view is that we have to work with the tools we have. And I don’t work from the assumption that Google intends to “do evil” to me. We may have to agree to disagree on that.

What it comes down to though is whether or not it is important to you for your content to be found online. If it is, then Google is the main game. Depending on whose figures you use and what part of the world you’re talking about, 60-80% of the searches done online are done on Google.

You say you want to see ALL information on any subject. But how can you possible do that? Do you walk into a library and check out all the books? Of course not. You rely on a number of curation devices to get to what will probably be best, from the librarians selections for that library to book reviews to bestseller lists, etc. There is no such thing as “give me all the information.” Everything is curated.

In my view, Authorship is the exact opposite of what you make it. It is the further democratization of search results. If someone becomes an authoritative author, it is because “the people have spoken” through their social interactions that say, “This writer is the best on this topic.” How could it be more fair than that. Google doesn’t choose your search results. “Votes” in the form of authoritative links from other people’s sites do. And Authorship humanizes that even more, as it moves toward real people “voting” for what should rank highest, not some Mighty Controlling Dictator.

Why volunteer to make it easier for them to track everything you do by using gmail or make everything you write disappear at once by using authorship? Yes, they can still track everything and still find everything – but if they want to do evil let’s not make it easier for them.

Personally, I prefer to be able to find ALL views about any subject – not just the two polarized views those who control the major media and everything else present. I have no desire to have someone else decide for me what it is I want to think, see, or read.

By “auto authorship” I meant that in a non-logged-in-to-Google (non-personalized) Google search for your content, Google was showing an authorship snippet for you, even though you hadn’t (yet) verified authorship. As I said in the article, for some time now Google has been giving the rich snippet result to many high-profile authors if they think they can make a reasonable connection between content and a G+ profile. But I still recommend doing full verification as a best practice. When AuthorRank really kicks in, I wouldn’t want to take chances missing out on its full benefits!

Thanks for the question, and thanks for all you bring to the online marketing world. I follow you online and benefit from your work often.

Again – thanks for your work on this!