Akismet didn’t like your comment for some reason so I had to rescue it from a trashbin filled with ads for ‘enhancement’ products.

I think it’s a trap that well run companies, like Standard Oil and Google, encounter as their technical and business expertise captures a large percentage of the market. In their competitive zeal they run roughshod over small competitors and those who associate with them. I’d like to see Google avoid this trap.

Of course, I think it is quite a valid comparison. Google is behaving the same way as other companies that have run into problems with anti-trust laws. I could have just as easily drawn comparisons between them and AT&T or Microsoft.

I do think they have time to change direction. I wish they would avoid the problem since some of my retirement investment depends upon them continuing to make money and not on them being distracted by a long, drawn out, legal battle.

Those new ones may be as good as the old one.

I think Google will determine that putting that little green bar in their toolbar was a mistake because it put them in the business of determining the value of websites to the whole world.

If they had kept PageRank to themselves and developed an objective, hands off, metric based on traffic and a few other public factors it would have been much better.

the whole anti-paid-link propaganda they ramped up last March or so is just to drive more and more business to Adwords… Where your ranks, and increasing costs, are guaranteed…

I think that Google’s advertising could do quite well without the search although funding the search might be difficult without the advertising revenue.

PPP is already organizing a “write your Congressperson” campaign and it’s likely that other affected companies might do the same. You don’t want your company being the subject of a Congressional investigation or, even worse, have someone at the Justice Department building a career on taking your company down. I think this is the way Google is headed though if they keep beating up on the “little guys”.

I don’t think we’ll see them splitting the company any time soon. I’m not sure we’ll see anyone from Justice going after them anytime soon either. I don’t think the government even realizes what Google is doing or has a firm enough grasp of how their business works to understand that they have a monopoly and that they’re flexing some major muscle.