Google is powerful — and we all learned from Orwell that power corrupts. As to search, Google has near total power — will total power totally corrupt Google?

Ask BMW, whose SEO strategy violated Google’s “orthodoxy,” leading Google to unceremoniously excommunicate BMW’s German website from its “organic” search results. The BBC reported this action as a “death penalty.”

Google controls a huge percentage of the traffic flow on the Internet — and it has annoited itself judge, jury, and executioner for anyone who violates its “quality guidelines.” As Alexander Muse puts it:

No trial, no jury - just death…
Sorry guys!

It’s one thing for Google to tweak its algorithms to lower the search ranking of sites they perceive to be “gaming the system” (although even this is Big-Brotherish) — it’s quite another to summarily reduce a company’s page rank to zero.

You could argue that Google has searchers best interest in mind, but when you smell the stench of “orthodoxy,” you have to ask yourself — is Google’s unchecked power really serving its users well, or is it being blinded by its own definition of “right” and “wrong” in the struggle to get noticed online.

Alexander had a rather chilling update to his post:

Update: Brian IM’d me that he was worried Google would zap our pagerank for writting this post. WOW! He was seriously concerned. Are you concerned too?

Is Publishing 2.0 at risk for this display of dissent? How far down the slippery slip does Google have to slide before they start Stalinistically stamping out dissent?

We might be inclined to trust Google’s technology — algorithms do what they are programmed to do — but can we trust the corruptible human intelligence behind those algorithms, which may be tempted to take their power to unfortunate extremes? Will history repeat itself in the politics of online information flow?

Matt Cutts, Google’s enforcer of search orthodoxy, turned off comments for his blog post on BMW — stamping out conversation — not a good omen.

Add this to the China censorship fiasco.

Paging George Orwell.

Filed under: Geek, Society