Earlier I wrote

how Google seems to have had a bad week, with some recent negative publicity

making it seem like the tipping point of Google becoming the big bad company

they don’t want to be happening — at least perhaps in the eyes of many opinion

makers on the web. Clearly I wasn’t

alone thinking this.

But then again, I can’t help but note that I’ve seen people question whether

Google has lost popular goodwill so many times over the years. I thought it

would be useful to actually list a number of these "tipping points" that Google’s

nonetheless survived.

February 2001: Deja Tipping Point

Google’s first serious crisis, in my view, was when it had to alter the Deja

newsgroup service temporarily. Acquired in February 2001, later that month

functionality was greatly reduced. My

article

from the time covers the "revolt" and upset that Google faced during this time.

Until then, Google pretty much had been viewed as a sweetheart company that

could do no wrong. Despite the outcry, Google continued upward. And the service

did get much better, as promised.

April 2002: Scientology Tipping Point

After Google overstepped and pulled too many pages from an anti-Scientology

web site, an outcry that kicked up concerns about censorship. Pages were

restored, and Google also instituted a policy of publicly listing Digital

Millennium Copyright Act requests its received. My

article

from the time has more.

August 2002: Google Watch Born Milestone

Not really a tipping point, but a milestone worth noting. Google gained its

first serious anti-Google web site, Daniel Brandt’s

Google Watch. This happened during

the midst of a number of other issues making people wonder if Google was getting

too big and powerful. From the opening of my

Google: Can

The Marcia Brady Of Search Stay Sweet? article at the time, covering these

developments:

Anyone who’s ever watched the 70s television show "The Brady Bunch" knows

that eldest daughter Marcia was the star of the family. At least, this was the

view of middle daughter Jan, who complained once that everyone was always

talking about "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" Jan’s words have echoing through my head for the past few months, because

in matters of search, I’ve been hearing a crescendo of "Google, Google,

Google!" In the "Search Engine Bunch," Google is Marcia Brady, the family member who

seemingly gets more attention than the others. But while the Jans of the bunch

might be envious of Google’s popularity, there are also serious downsides to

being at the top. In particular, Google’s biggest challenge may be that so many people now

see it as the only search engine that "matters," a marketplace dominance in

search that seems akin to that which Microsoft has with operating systems,

office software and web browsers. Microsoft’s supremacy as a company has caused it to be widely loathed. Does

search dominance by Google mean that the company is destined to face general

hatred, as well? Such a fate is not preordained, as we shall see. But first,

let’s review just a few examples of how people have viewed Google as all

powerful.

December 2002: Listing Issues Make The New York Times Milestone

Another milestone moment. I’d warned that listing issues might be a potential

downfall for Google earlier this year. So had others in the SEO space. By the

end of 2002, we have a first major mainstream media look at this,



Sites Become Dependent on Google on Dec. 9, 2002. This end quote from the

article sound familiar?

The free ride may not last, however. Ms. Johnson of Forrester says larger

companies have been discovering the power of search engines and site

optimization. As was the case on eBay when big retailers moved in, search

listings are becoming less democratic. "It’s going to be more and more

difficult for small sellers to get noticed," she said. "The free listings

lunch may be ending soon."

You hear small sites say the same things today, which indicates the free ride

did NOT go away over all those years despite the fears. And the smart money, I’d

say, is that it’s still not going to be going away for years to come.

January 2003: Wired’s Google Vs. Evil Article Milestone

Another milestone event. This was the first major look

from Wired

at Google’s "Don’t Be Evil" philosophy, with the company somewhat arrogantly

suggesting with that philosophy that other companies are evil. It covers many of

the things I discussed in that "Marcia Brady of search" article a half-year

before, but the questions and concerns about how Google might develop had only

grown. The concluding paragraph:

It’s inevitable that a company of Google’s size and influence will have to

compromise on purity. There’s a chance that, in five years, Google will end up

looking like a slightly cleaner version of what Yahoo! has become. There’s

also a chance that the site will be able to make a convincing case to

investors that long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The

leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin’s to lose. For now, at least, in

Google we trust.

Google-Opoly: The Game No One but

Google Can Play from Slate on Jan. 29, 2003 also gets in on the "is Google

to be feared" action.

February 2003: Google & Big Brother Nomination Tipping Point

In February

2003, Google was nominated

by the Google Watch for Privacy International’s

2003 US Big

Brother Awards. Anyone could be nominated for it. Gandhi could have been

nominated for it. And Google didn’t win it. But the specter Google having an

"immortal" cookie along with other privacy allegations continue to haunt it to

this day.

Has Google

Ruined the Web? from PC Magazine and



The Web, According to Google from BusinessWeek are just two of the negative

articles that resulted in June of that year, and I still see articles like these

continue on.

For a long

look at the allegations, see my

Google And

The Big Brother Nomination article from the time. Despite the allegations,

Google survived the crisis and continued to grow. Indeed, it was the

only major

search engine to stand up to a wide-ranging request for search records from the

US government earlier this year. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo also gave information

that didn’t violate personally identifiable information but still raised plenty

of red flags warranting opposition.

June 2003: Is There A Google Backlash Milestone

Another milestone.

The

Google backlash from Salon on June 25, 2003 is the first major "is there a

backlash" piece that I can recall. I wrote about this article at the time:

Is Google’s popularity causing a backlash against it? When Salon writer

Farhad Manjoo asked me, my response was immediate. Absolutely. Google is no

longer some tiny, start-up company. It’s a search behemoth, and behemoths of

any type make some people nervous. As always, there are some serious concerns about Google, as explained in

this article. And as always, many of these are applicable to other search

engines, as well.

This may have been the first major mainstream "backlash" article, but it was

hardly the last



Is a Google Backlash Building? from BusinessWeek in 2004 was another. There

have been many since.

June 2003: Google As God Milestone

Yet another milestone.



Is Google God? was the name of the Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York

Times on June 29, 2003. It was one of the worst things that could happen to

Google. That’s because it put Google up on an impossible pedestal that it could

only slip from. From my review of the article at the time:

Could we now make it a requirement that anyone planning to write about

Google must use at least one other search engine? Perhaps then we’ll see some

perspective. This opinion piece hits a new Google high — Google as God. If Google is God, then someone should explain to columnist Thomas Friedman

that the search engine universe, like ancient Greece and Rome, has several of

them. Other search engines have the incredible power to show you what people

are searching for worldwide, just like Google

November 2003: Google’s Florida Update Tipping Point

A major ranking algorithm update

knocks

many sites out of rankings they’d held for months if not years, right before the

holiday season. Panic ensues on search forums. Google is declared scroogelike.

Despite injuring so many sites, Google survives.

April 2004: Gmail Tipping Point

Soon after Gmail was launched, major waves of concern over ads being targeted

toward email content erupted. Laws were even proposed specifically to stop it.

This was probably the biggest unexpected crisis Google faced outside of Deja

nearly three years before. The company had to spend major amounts of time

convincing people it was not going to violate privacy. Concerns remain, but

Google’s largely overcome this particular tipping point.

April 2004: Jew Watch Tipping Point

The high ranking of an anti-Jewish site for a search on "jew" gets Google

execs such as Sergey Brin out to defend the company plus causes the first ever

disclaimer to be posted on Google’s search results pages, outside of DMCA

removal notices. More from my

article

at the time.

August 19, 2004: Google Goes Public Tipping Point

Google forced to go public to satisfy US laws plus provide employees some

payoff. It’s a tipping point simply because it led to the inevitable loss of

trusted Googlers who’d been with the company from the start and built its

culture (Google’s marketing chief Cindy McCaffrey was one of the



first to go).

It also leaves the company forced to respond to Wall Street pressures,

already illustrated before it goes public by lowering its initial bid price.

It’s an ongoing crisis where the outcome remains unknown. It’s naive to think

Google post-IPO could stay as the fairly innocent company it once was. But can

it be a major corporation yet still enjoy large popularity and trust.

Despite blogosphere opinion, I’d say that so far with rank-and-file ordinary

users, that’s remained the case. It’s self-evident in the continued usage of

Google. Here’s a recent New York Times article



also finding users still loving Google even when aware of its growth. Will

that opinion stay strong?

February 2005: Click Fraud Tipping Point

Click fraud was going to be the death of Google, with advertisers bringing it

down. Just over

a year later, a $90 million settlement was reached, not even pocket change to

the Big G.

April 2005: Grand Plan Tipping Point

Newsweek looks

at concerns that Google doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to what

it’s doing, especially after the idea that Yahoo somehow has

gained the

product mojo (and see

here).

Google’s Marissa Mayer responds, "We definitely have a grand plan." Despite

that, the concerns don’t go away. Google doesn’t help when Google CEO Eric

Schmidt has this



exchange with Information Week in May 2005:

InformationWeek: …people outside the company like to imagine that

there’s some sort of grand strategic vision that’s driving everything. Schmidt: [laughs] They’ve obviously not visited Google. We delight

in the lack of such strategy. We’re very careful to say we’re not trying to

build one thing. We’re trying to innovate in all these interesting spaces.

The crisis isn’t resolved. There’s a stream of speculation that Google can’t

have another big homegrown success as with search, such as in this Fortune



article from October 2006. Google also recent

called for a

pause on new products to improve existing ones.

August 2005: Portal Tipping Point

"Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." That was part of

Google’s original philosophy pitch when it said it wasn’t going to be like all

those portals that neglected search. By August 2005,

it was clear

even to Google that it was doing these things, so the philosophy page was

changed. Despite becoming a portal (it still won’t admit to being a portal, but

stealth portal it

is) — despite putting ads on its home page (like

here and

here) Google

continues to draw traffic and thus seems to still be surviving the crisis.

September 2006: Copyright Tipping Point 1

The first of several lawsuits over Google scanning in copyright books from

libraries is

filed. The program continues to draw fire from all types of publishers, and

the controversy shows no sign of abating. Arguably, it’s one of the worst PR

problems that Google faces. Then again, its program where publishers

participating in the book search project has plenty of supporters.

January 2006: Google Censors In China Tipping Point

One of the biggest issues Google has faced continues to dog it. The search

engine censors

(and see here) its

results in order to try and become a more successful business in China. The spin

that this ensures many people have access to at least lots of information still

doesn’t wash in many quarters, especially when Google is self-admittedly evil

using its own



EvilRank scale. Still, despite the censorship, Google has continued onward

and upward — though ironically, still not so successfully in China.

September 2006: Copyright Tipping Point 2

This deserves separate attention over copyright, since it deals with content

being found through automated fashion, rather than scanning — the core of how

Google operates.

Belgium news publishers win a case to get themselves removed from Google,

something that could have happened without a lawsuit. But the

point is

really to try and force Google to pay them for inclusion. Perhaps it works.

Google strikes an

agreement with some, though not the main party. An agreement with the

Associated Press happened earlier this year.

Google denies these are specifically about protecting the right to crawl,

though the agreements stave off those lawsuits. Whether many more publishers

will force it to come up with agreements remains to be seen.

December 2006: Tips Tipping Point

Small "tips" promoting Google products

create a fairly

large uproar, almost seeming to be a straw that broke the camels back over

growing concerns about Google. Is this the real tipping point where trust is

lost? Is it just the latest in a series of tipping points Google overcomes? Or

is the real tipping point simply that each of these tipping points in totally

reduce the company down into something more ordinary, more typical company like.

I’m sure I’m probably missing some big tipping points here. Not everyone will

agree with what I’ve written, of course. Please share your thoughts and opinions

below.