Google Watch

Google Watch is a website launched in 2002 by Public Information Research, a non-profit public charity run by Daniel Brandt. Brandt states that the website's goals are to report on conflicts of interest in Google's corporate structure, the public's dependency on it for information, invasion of privacy issues, and its increasing commercial links with private interests.

Critiques of Google
The site states: "Given that Google is so central to the web, whatever attitude it takes toward privacy has massive implications for the rest of the web in general, and for other search engines in particular." It calls Google a "privacy time bomb", accusing it of collecting an excessive amount of personal data on its users and of doing too little to protect that data.

Google Watch documents concerns about privacy risks arising from Google's use of long-lived HTTP cookies. More recently, the web site has highlighted the issue of "made for AdSense pages"&mdash;spam pages with content often scraped from other sites that sometimes enjoy high rankings in search engines due to sophisticated optimization techniques.

Brandt expressed privacy concerns with Google Print, which unlike libraries, keeps track of who reads a given book and could pass that information on to the government.

Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert and editor of industry newsletter Search Engine Watch, engaged in a point-by-point analysis of Google-Watch's Big Brother allegations and concluded that they were baseless.

Actions taken
To illustrate the view that Google's search engine could be subjected to manipulation, Google Watch implemented a Google bomb by linking the phrase "out-of-touch executives" to Google's own page on its corporate management. The attempt was mistakenly attributed to disgruntled Google employees by The New York Times, which later printed a correction. , the Google bomb still results in a top ranking on Yahoo! Search, but stopped working on Google in July 2004.

Google Watch continues to raise Google-related privacy issues, particularly its use of cookies which have a life span of more than 32 years and incorporate a unique ID that enables creation of a user data log. It has also made allegations about connections between Google and the NSA and the CIA.

Public Information Research has set up Scroogle, which enables people to use Google's search engine via an ad-free proxy server.

Related topics

 * Google and privacy issues
 * Googlezon

Google Watch