Still Being Evil

It's been a while since I moaned about Google and its continuing abuse of its dominant position in the internet search business.  But now I have two fronts to attack them on: not only are they attempting to force smaller, independent sites off of the web by destroying their traffic, but the bastards are also avoiding paying taxes in the UK through the ruse of Google UK being a Luxembourg (or some such place) registered company (or something like that).  If ever proof were needed that they are greedy, evil corporate bastards, there it is.  So come on Google, not only do some of us want our web traffic back, but we'd also like you to pay your fucking tax bill.  The trouble is that I don't see either one of these things happening any time soon.  Google will continue to brazen it out with individual governments and organisations like the EU for as long as possible, spinning it usual bullshit about how wonderful they are and how they are benefiting mankind with their innovations and so on.  And many will continue to buy this crap, refusing to recognise that Google has become just another corporate behemoth, interested only in serving the interests of its shareholders - not the wider community - by squeezing every last cent of profit from its increasingly rigged search results.  (The latter, of course, now favour other big brands and Google's own web subsidiaries, rather than actually serving up results relevant to search queries).

Inevitably, of course, another search source will eventually appear on the web, providing what seem to be better, more relevant, search results and its popularity will increase as word-of-mouth spreads.  Eventually it will eclipse Google's search engine. It's the way things happen on the web.  It's how Google grew.  Because Google has such a dominant position in search, this could take years to happen, (pre-Google, there were a number of competing search engines, with no completely dominant).  But it will happen.  Simultaneously, Google's dominance and activities will attract more and more investigations by the EU, the US government and other bodies, which will also slowly erode its position.  But again, this could take many years.  In the meantime, those of us struggling to maintain any traffic to our non-commerce sites,(Google doesn't really see the point of anything that doesn't make money), will, I fear, find it ever more dispiriting and many will give up.  Really, what's the point of creating new content if Google won't let anybody find it through their search results, no matter how relevant it might be to specific queries?  But don't worry - they aren't evil.  Just corporate bastards.