But it is also true that people like Mr. Savage, who are demonstrably not bad guys, find themselves in Google’s doghouse and then can’t even get the company to respond to them. Is it any wonder that they feel treated unfairly by a ruthless monopolist? What makes it worse is that Google simply refuses to acknowledge that its algorithms could ever be wrong. Could Google really treat its own customers so shabbily if it faced true competition?

So what is Google’s problem with Sourcetool? One likely possibility is that Google views Sourcetool as an example of a practice called ad arbitrage, which it frowns upon. Those are sites that bid on search terms not to provide a service, but simply to con people into clicking through the ads on its site. Though nobody at Google would say so directly, I got the distinct impression that Google thought Mr. Savage was practicing a form of ad arbitrage with his site. He did, after all, bid on search terms and make his money on advertisements on his site.

But Mr. Savage is clearly offering a real service: his directory. Indeed, in many ways, the look and feel of his site resembles that of Google’s partner business.com. The ways Sourcetool differs from business.com are what Mr. Savage views as his competitive advantages. They include the way he ranks companies, and a directory page that gives information about each company.

When I pressed Mr. Fox about Sourcetool, he refused to tell me why the algorithm had problems with the site. When I asked him why the business.com site was in the algorithm’s good graces but Sourcetool’s wasn’t, he wouldn’t tell me that, either. All I got were platitudes about the user experience. It wasn’t long before I was almost as exasperated as Mr. Savage. How can you adapt your business model to Google’s specs if Google won’t tell you what the specs are?

Google also told me that it never made judgments of what was “good” and “bad” because it was all in the hands of the algorithm. But that turns out not to be completely true. Mr. Savage shared with me an e-mail message from a Google account executive to someone at another company who had run into the same kind of landing page problem as Sourcetool. The Google account executive wrote back to say that she had looked at the site and found that “there seems to be a wealth of valuable information on the site.” Consequently, her team overruled the algorithm.

The problem with monopolists, of course, is that they just can’t help acting like monopolists, even supposedly benign monopolists like Google and even when they are not consciously trying to rub out the competition. They are always right and everybody else is wrong. They have disdain for their own customers, knowing those customers have nowhere else to turn. They tell small fry like Mr. Savage to stop bugging them.

That is how Microsoft acted a decade ago, and that, increasingly, is how Google is acting. Half the time, the company doesn’t even realize how egregious its behavior has become, which is why it feels so misunderstood when it is criticized.