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First Victory: Google Web Accelerator Pulled!
(rt) Hop over to Google’s → Web Accelerator and look closely. What you should see there is exactly this:
What this really translates to beyond the usual rituals of corporate softspeak: “We’ve experienced a PR nightmare with this thingy. We’ve had it – now, damage control is everything. Let’s pretend we never launched it, ok?”
Of course, they’re likely to come back – in a slightly more “friendly” format, with some opt-out features in place, perhaps, a ton of bugs removed, but essentially focused on the very same targets which seduced them to put even the few tattered remains of their former (in our view: quite undeserved) good reputation at risk (point proven, ‘plex!) in the pursuit of digital world dominance. Because there’s far too much at stake here for Google to lend their critics’ and foes’ victory any realistic degree of sustainability.
If they are smart, and to be fair, occasionally they have actually proven to be, they will now lick their wounds, possibly fire a few old hands to set an example, and will work on their public image, maybe hiring some spinmeisters of Scoble’s caliber to win back friends and influence people again.
A setback, certainly – but a single battle doesn’t yet make a war. And like it or not, this war is sure to go on: until they have either prevailed or to the point that their deep, deep coffers are irrevocably drained.
Well, thanks everybody for your support! Thanks, too, to all those geeks and propellerheads out there who worked overtime to test and critique this piece of malware and to post and report and rant about it – this is no single critic’s achievement, it’s a grassroot “We the Surfers” movement of an intellectual momentum the likes of which even Microsoft did not have to muster in their company’s worst nightmare phases.
And now, back to AutoLink …
You read our take on Google’s designs here:
↗ Google – The Coming Out of a Datascraper Spook
and here:
↗ fantOpEd:
Search Engines as Data Gobblers
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[Keywords: consumer tracking, data mining, Google proxy, Google Web Accelerator, search engine spiders, spider IPs, spyware, traffic analysis, web analytics, web stats ]
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