IRISH EXAMINER -- On the day Yahoo announced its European headquarters would be in Dublin, Google released a new beta of its toolbar. The resultant firestorm might cause Google to neuter parts of the toolbar because it can actually rewrite web pages—it hijacks content.
Most people won’t see this happening. Instead, they notice they can get more information than ever before. They can vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on web pages they visit. They can "search this site" from the toolbar but that feature is not precise enough when visiting blogs.
The contentious part of the toolbar creates hyperlinks to books and stateside businesses. While that is a welcome enhancement for many people, some power users object to the way the toolbar rewrites their content by injecting hyperlinked data where there was none before.
When a web server—or a toolbar—changes web content, it damages message integrity. The web page no longer behaves as designed by the developer. I believe when a tool injects third party content without consent of the web page author, it is unethical.
When the Google toolbar puts new outgoing links on your pages, you can no longer trust that your hyperlinks point to safe, reliable and relevant content. Some of those new links may even point to a competitor.
I ran the Google toolbar for three days and discovered that it will probably kill the nominal flow of money that I receive from Amazon Associates because it removes manually created HTML that I produce with my merchant code in the hyperlink to ISBN numbers that I place at the bottom of book reviews. The Google toolbar replaces my Associates code with Google-coded info. It cheekily does the same thing when visiting other book merchants like Barnes and Noble.
This link trick also bothers programmer Rogers Cadenhead. “I fund my Web server in part through the revenue generated by affiliate links to my books -- sites earned around $3,300 from Amazon.Com referrals in 2004. In principle, Google Toolbar's new functionality could be used to replace these links with ones that commercially benefit Google.”
In the worst case, this is Google changing the content of the web for the purpose of profit. In the best case, this is Google changing the browsing experience. You might not want someone to jump off your web page in the middle of it—but that would clearly be a hyperlink option if you placed an address on your page that was available from Google Maps.
What web developer wants certain words and phrases to become hotlinks to untested sites? Who commissions a web site to drive potential customers to competitors?
Dynamically adding hyperlinks is not a new idea. Microsoft floated a similar concept with its Smart Tags feature a few years ago. Smart Tags essentially created hyperlinks where none had existed before, and sent people clicking on those links to Microsoft-chosen content. Now the Smart Tags programmer works for Google, the de facto operating system of the web. Most people search the web using Google as their guide. Many use the toolbar to get around.
The Google toolbar creates a derivative work out of a normal web page. When a visitor to your site activates the “Auto Link” feature, parts of your web page may change to display things called by the Auto Link engine. The changes occur subtly so it’s very difficult to notice that any page content changed.
If Google rolls its Auto Link feature into an official release of the toolbar, many people will not know how it works. They won’t know that clicking Auto Link automatically adds hyperlinks to some text on the page. They won’t see their browser transforming a web page.
I have seen people using autolinks in Office 2003. They use the names served up as email contacts or street addresses. They don’t challenge the accuracy of the information. Most of them don’t know how the computer finds the information. They trust its correctness and keep on working. You would have to assume the same reaction if dynamic information was served on a Google-mediated web page.
Rewriting pages to add links is a dangerous practise. If the current Google toolbar becomes a full-scale release, it will bypass all the careful checking of hyperlinks done by webmasters. It will skewer social networking arrangements between sites. It will force web developers to rethink the words they place on pages, perhaps avoiding anything that looks like a postal address or ISBN.
Published in the Irish Examiner as "Problems with Google Toolbar" on February 25, 2005.
John Handelaar -- "Back off with your Google toolbar"
Eric Goldman -- "Google's autolink tool"
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