Google Under Fire for Commercialization of Knowledge

In a very thought-provoking article published in a British online newspaper, journalist Micah White has raised questions about the commercialization of information by Google.com and the effects on society in general. White sees Google's increasingly advertisement-laden search pages as signaling a dangerous trend with deep consequences for future generations. Commercialization of knowledge can lead to a dumbing-down effect in society that may be difficult to reverse.

White points out the evolution of Google from a company which once publicly denounced the concept of advertising-related searches, and especially the selling of top search results, into a organization that brazenly employs those exact practices. Google is now the biggest online advertising company in the world, with more than 98% of its income coming from commercial content. White feels that the company has strayed too far from its original ideology and says that
"Google is not a search engine; it is the most powerful commercialising force on the planet."

White points out that there are surveys that show that most people have a hard time distinguishing advertisements from real information. And what real information there is remains suspect due to the automated key phrase algorithms that determine relevance based on a mysterious ever-changing formula.

In addition to the seemingly obvious dangers of commercializing the world's knowledge, Google employs indexing in sorting information, a practice which has been recognized for hundreds of years as being detrimental to the acquisition of knowledge by an individual. Indexing is a way of skimming information and leads away from deep understanding. White maintains that the Google approach ignores, to its detriment, the categorization of knowledge methods employed by academic libraries that divided information into three categories - memory, imagination and reason. This method, developed by Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, allowed for the forming of a gestalt; a balanced overview, that was not based on compartmentalizing bits of information that could be accessed by an index.

As more companies take advantage of the commercial opportunities Google offers, the dumbing-down process is likely to continue. Cheap hosting combined with a barrage of "relevant" informative content can bring up a company's rankings, so the avalanche of suspect info will increase along with more advertisements, leaving precious little of real worth to glean from the countless webhosting sources available. The future of useful information is at stake.