When Good Search Engines Go Bad - Is Google's new AutoLink a force for evi

http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2114308

Has Google turned evil? Web pundit Dave Winer calls the search behemoth's new AutoLink feature "the first step down a treacherous slope that could spell the end of the Web." ZDNet's Steve Gillmor says it's "a pure land grab." Slashdot chimes in with the ultimate insult: "Is Google AutoLink Patent-Pending By Microsoft?"

What's all the hubbub about? A couple of little blue links. AutoLink is part of the new beta version of the Google toolbar. It's possible to disable AutoLink with a single mouse click, but if you do keep it turned on the toolbar will crawl each page you surf for mailing addresses, book ISBN numbers, auto VIN numbers, and package tracking numbers. If a restaurant publishes its address, Google links that to a map. If an author's Web site lists her books by ISBN number, each one becomes a link to Amazon's page for the book. Why only this oddball collection of items? Because they can be reliably identified and have only one correct match. Google won't try to link "Paul Boutin" to anything because it can't distinguish between me and Mariah Carey's recording engineer.

Is Google using its huge market share to edit people's Web pages without consent? Not according to U.S. copyright law. Once you download digital content—a Web page—onto your computer, it's yours to mess with as you please as long as you don't redistribute it. As Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow explains, AutoLink is like a remix tool: It won't replace an existing link with one of its own, but it does insert new links that the page's author might have overlooked. Moreover, Google swears up and down that it's not making any money from the companies it links to (Amazon, Carfax, MapQuest). Nope, it's just offering a free tool that you might find helpful. That argument didn't go over well at Barnes & Noble, which discovered that AutoLink was inserting links to Amazon.com on BN.com book pages.

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The real issue isn't AutoLink; it's Google's ever-growing clout as the $50 billion monolith of search. "What Google isn't taking into account is that its market power, and the tendency of users to accept the default … will tend to create Google's version of the Web, not the users' version," writes veteran tech journalist Dan Gillmor. And he's got a point, considering that five out of six grown Americans can't tell search results from ads.

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find stuff I can find on google :(