The ethical and legal problems that occasionally Google is confronted with are essentially the same as any site run by any individual or business: Do I have an obligation to the people who use my site? How do I reconcile that with legal considerations? How do I reconcile that with my personal need to make money (either from my site or without my site interfering with that process)? A recent (but already well-linked and not particularly new) article in Wired – Google vs. Evil – talks about the kinds of decisions that have been made in what must now be the world’s most useful search-engine company. If only all online enterprises were as angst-ridden and committed to self-examination…
The company’s growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to “hate” sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology’s attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google’s archive of previously indexed pages?