COMMENTARY--Google is one of the best things on the Web--but there are signs that it may be tempted into rank commercialism.

For many people, the Web is Google. The first port of call for any query, that clean, uncluttered page has replaced portals, hotlists, directories and many other half-forgotten inventions for Web navigation. But all is not as it seems behind that friendly façade.

Search engines are beasts that look simple but hide enormous complexity. What could be simpler than typing in a word and finding where it exists on the Internet? If that was all Google did, it would be above suspicion--and useless.

Google's charm and power comes from context. Not only does it record the occurrence of nearly every word on the three billion documents--Web pages, PDF files and so on--it knows about, it analyses how many references there are to each document from others. Very crudely, the more links to a page there are, the better the result. And if a page with a high rating links to you, that counts for a lot too. Finally, if your site is frequently updated, then Google loves it even more.

Which is fine, if you assume a Web that's entirely unaware of the way its being searched. But the Web is symbiotic with Google--both rely on the other--and like any good symbiote the Web adjusts itself to make best use of its partner. So people are becoming adept at creating groups of sites whose structure and content are designed to be artificially prominent in the Google lists.

It gets much worse with blogs, which could have been custom-designed to persuade Google to disgorge the nectar of high page rankings. Highly self-referential, nests of mutually linking blogs can take a phrase, duplicate it across ten or 100 sites in a short time, and hit the big time on Google. That's not news--Google bombing, as it's called, was first described and demonstrated last year. There's already been at least one high-profile skirmish in the page ranks between the Church of Scientology and supporters of the anti-Scientology Operation Clambake. Google is itself aware of this and has made efforts to spot and deal with deliberate attempts to tweak the ratings. It's all very Darwinist, yet Google seems sure of itself and its mission to deliver its best attempt at objectivity.

But Google has recently bought Pyra Labs, the company that started blogging as a mainstream activity and that has around a million users. Those who worry about such things approve on the whole, but the effective recruiting of a large city's worth of online content and reference-generating people into the Googleverse could have considerable commercial impact on the way the Google rankings are created.

It adds to the impression that, having swallowed Usenet, Google is on its way to an effective monopoly of online information provision--and we all know what happens with monopolies. Fortunately, we can still trust Google--the company's got a great reputation for putting its core job of delivering unbiased search results above all other factors. But that feeling of trust may change.

Cue the hyperactive Andrew Orlowski, The Register's embedded correspondent in the battlefields of Silicon Valley, who is that dangerous animal: a literate, energetic iconoclast. He's got Google in his sights, first for the power Google bombing puts in the hands of bloggers, and more recently for the company's rather unusual attitude to news.

Of late, Google has taken to providing a news service, an online index of stories published from hundreds of news outlets. Using similar ideas to its mainstream Web indexing, the company ranks these stories and groups them by context. Fair enough. But what Google has never said is what it what qualifies information for inclusion. Anyone who claims to serve up news has to be open about this, otherwise they're open to accusations of running adverts masquerading as the truth. We now know, thanks to Orlowski, that Google considers press releases as news--and that it's not at all comfortable with discussing its policy. Is this the first sign that commercial imperatives are being given higher ranking than playing fair with its users?

Those commercial imperatives are huge. Other search engines are getting into bed with such Net nasties as Gator, the company which specialises in sneaking software onto your computer to subvert its behaviour and display adverts when you least expect them. Search engines Overture, Terra Lycos and FindWhat now use Gator's spyware to intercept search terms typed into Google or Yahoo! on the victim's computer, opening up another window with the top hits from their search databases. These are paid for by advertisers--in effect, they're just adverts masquerading as search results--and in my opinion are one of the most unpleasant things someone can legally do to your computer. Those companies partnering with Gator know it too--but choose to shrug off the opprobrium because that's where the money is, these days.

If Google is prepared to squander its good name for bucks, the Net will become a lot less useful to a lot of people. Trust cannot be bought back once sold, and mistrust of one area of a company spreads quicker through the body corporate than mould through an orange. Here's hoping that Google's stance is due to ignorance rather than greed, and that the company will swiftly reassure us that its commitment to objectivity is paramount.

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