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NEWS > TECHNOLOGY > GOOGLE TO RESTRICT WEB ACCESS FOR USERS USING COMPETING SEARCH ENGINES
GOOGLE TO RESTRICT WEB ACCESS FOR USERS USING COMPETING SEARCH ENGINES
March 7 2009
Mountain View, CA – With this week’s announcement of ‘Kumo’, the new search engine currently in development by Microsoft, the ubiquitous Google is a little more worried than they ever have been before. With declining advertising dollars, a stock nearly halved from what it was a year ago, and the spectre of serious competition from one of the wealthiest companies in the world, it’s safe to say that the house Brin and Page built is on softening ground. Now though Google has decided to take a proactive approach to the imposing threat by banning users of opposing search engines from accessing Google search.
In a series of documents recently leaked, Google has laid out plans for their aggressive domination of the all important web search. In part, the company plans to place cookies on the browsers of all Google visitors that will report other search engine activity and restrict users from doing searches or using other Google services such as Gmail or Chrome.
“In order to maintain effective market share and continue to provide users with the best search experience possible Google needs to work in a restriction free environment and to
that end it is in our best interest to limit the influence of competitors,” said the internal documents, in part. “In order to effect this environment we must showcase our search superiority for clients and provide users with the best experience, not the widest ranging. This project will allow us to streamline our market and better assess the needs of our clients.”
Codenamed Project SO, the new software has already begun to roll out into real world applications but will, for the time being, remain in Beta. The plan also calls for limited abatement of denied services, a change to Google’s normally one strike and you’re out policy. 
“In theory it is an interesting plan but they may run into issues with litigators and the SEC. It’s hard to see how the government is not going to have to take action especially when other search providers start to complain, never mind customers,” said Scrape TV Technology analyst Ken Kevins. “The argument I suppose is that you don’t walk into McDonald’s with a meal from Burger King and if you do the restaurant has the right to ask you to leave. That of course will leave you with an angry customer but businesses need to do what they can to protect their business. Somehow Google is going to have to sell that to all web users and if they are successful, well that’s a very captive audience. If not, well they’ll have to be happy with 65 per cent.”
The documents also outline a plan to restrict search visibility for sites not a part of their exclusive Adwords or Adsense programs, using the lack of participation, willing or unwilling, as a meter for determining both crawl speed and placement within search results. The company also plans to use similar technology, should the search dominance be successful, in other Google applications such as their lagging Gmail service.
“Ideally what they plan is restricting sending and receiving email from any account other than a Gmail account. That one is going to be a little harder to implement due to sheer number of email providers but if they are able to do it they will have a stranglehold on the web advertising market, which is of course what they are looking for,” continued Kevins. “Google has long been a supporter of Net Neutrality and that seems to be what they are pursuing, in the most ironic way possible. By keeping control of virtually all web traffic they will be able to enforce neutrality on ISP’s and companies that restrict content to different territories and meanwhile will collect massive ad revenue. This is an extensive program so it’s unlikely it’s a reaction to Kumo but more of a long term business plan.”
Of course a significant amount of web traffic remains direct addresses and links from other sites, particularly bookmarking sites like Digg. While the documents did not detail the company’s plans to affect that traffic it seems a likelihood that they will seek to control user actions as well.
“They could simply maintain a list of Google approved sites and utilize deep packet inspection to restrict direct addresses to non-aligned sites. As for sites like Digg, well they’ll just buy them all,” continued Kevins. “Normally an attempt at total monopoly like this would be a cause for concern but Google’s motto has always been ‘Don’t be Evil’ so they seem like pretty good guys. With that much power they could do some very illicit things but they do have that motto so we are probably all okay, as long as we do what they want.”
Project SO will be officially unveiled in the summer, as a beta.
Martin Philton, Technology Correspondent
NEWS > TECHNOLOGY > GOOGLE TO RESTRICT WEB ACCESS FOR USERS USING COMPETING SEARCH ENGINES
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