More on Google going commercial

[Craighton Hippenhammer]

As a follow-up to a recent discussion here about Google going commercial, new evidence has arrived on the Google site with their recent mounting of a beta version of a new retailer catalog service (http://catalogs.google.com).  
The catalog service follows on their recent entry into selling space on search results pages that are tied to keywords typed into their search boxes. This is not the same as (the much worse ) selling of placement in its database search results, but it certainly has its own ethical hazards.

As ZDNet News says in their article at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5100863,00.html, "The company has long cast itself as an incorruptible search service in an increasingly profit-driven business--an image that helped it win a die-hard grassroots following."  My guess is that this discussion group is a part of that group of die-hard users.  Will this ongoing commercialization of a very good search engine make any of you change your approach to this product?




Craighton Hippenhammer
Information Technology Librarian
Olivet Nazarene University
chhammer at olivet.edu



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