Google Watch keeps sharp eye on 'Big Brother'

Google, the company whose motto is "Don't be evil" and who encapsulates the easy-going generation X corporate culture of Silicon Valley, is suffering a major public relations crisis.

Last year, Google's image was badly damaged by controversies over privacy issues arising from the introduction of its email service, Gmail, and its desktop search engine.

Both products were branded a threat to individual privacy. Politicians, lawyers and bloggers all raised concerns about a secretive corporation holding personal emails and private information for decades.

Now Google may be facing more embarrassing questions. The non-profit watchdog, Google-Watch, has published the source code for its alternative search engine, Scroogle, to bait Google into a high-profile and potentially damaging legal battle.

Scroogle lets users "fetch" or "scrape" the results from a Google search, while leaving the ads behind. The results alone are displayed on the page in the same layout as Google's.

Using Scroogle also means that users bypass Google's cookie, so it has no way of tracking what sites you visit. The idea is to take away the commercial aspects of search engines and provide the information to users, in an attempt to "take back the Web" from the businessmen who betrayed its non-commercial roots.

Set up in 2003, Scroogle (a reference to "scraping" and Ebenezer Scrooge) was closed down within a few months by Google, but Google-Watch simply moved the site to a different server and it believes it wouldn't be worth it for Google to try to find it again.

By publishing the source code to the programme that filters out the ads, Google-Watch is allowing anyone to run the programme themselves and also hopes to goad Google into a reaction.

Mr Daniel Brandt, the man behind Google Watch and the self-proclaimed "most prominent critic of Google's outrageous privacy policies for more than two years", has publicly invited Google to issue a cease-and-desist order against him.

He sees it as a catch-22 situation. If the wealthy Google prosecutes him through the courts and ends his campaign, it will be a black mark against a company that has always prided itself on its excellent public relations.

On the other hand, he says: "If it can be established that what we're doing is legal - or at least sufficiently legal so that Google is not eager to challenge us - then this will begin to restore a public-interest balance to the Web that has been declining ever since big money got behind the dotcoms."

It is more than likely that, rather than being a win-win situation for Mr Brandt, it will be a lose-lose one.

The success of his operation will depend on his ability to raise his public profile and make his concerns heard. He claims there have been about a hundred downloads of the code per day so far, which won't be causing much concern at Google HQ. Then there is the legal matter. "We are convinced that if citizens scrape Google and strip the ads, and make the scraped results available as a non-profit public service, that this is legal," the Google-Watch site says.

Although these motives may have the best democratic intentions, they seem dubious and blinded by optimism, particularly as the strength of his case relies on everyone who uses his code to do so for the public good with no commercial gain.

If Mr Brandt loses a legal challenge, he may not gain the public support he needs to counteract his loss. Many may feel that Google is perfectly entitled to protect its information.

Perhaps the most damaging flaw in Mr Brandt's campaign is his over-eager and personal tone. Although such headlines (from www.google-watch.org) as "Google grabs library books" and "Google's original sin" may gain the site coverage, they hardly further the cause beyond that.

As for the site itself, three searches on Scroogle - "Dermot Aherne", "the Incredibles" and "Dublin restaurants" - produced very similar results to its bigger rival, and without the ads. However, it also came without the options to look at pages from Ireland only, or to look at images, news or any other of the Google features.

Mr Brandt is not the first person to level the charge of "Big Brother" at Google and its reputation for secrecy and greed is spreading.

In another recent blow, scientists at a university in Texas discovered a flaw in Google Desktop that could permit an attacker to search the contents of a PC from the internet and look at bank statements or private emails.

A few days earlier, Wired magazine published a story saying that Google News had been putting up press releases from the ultra-right wing British National Party on the front page of search results.

Google's refusal to comment on the process it uses to search news stories only made it seem more furtive.

Then, influential Google blogger Om Malik published a story about thriftiness at the Christmas party, saying that all part-time and contract workers were excluded from the Hawaiian-themed festive bash.

However, 2004 was also the year that Google doubled its share price within six months and it remains to be seen whether management are still driven to retain the same warm, wacky perception in the public eye.

After all, negative publicity is still hype - something Google has always thrived upon.