Google Watch

Google Watch is a website launched in 2002 by Public Information Research. PIR founder Daniel 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.

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."

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.

To illustrate his view that Google's search engine could be subjected to manipulation, Brandt implemented a so-called 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. This Google bomb still results in a top ranking on Yahoo!, 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. Brandt 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.