Google's $20 million Christmas Gift List Raises Question of Offsets
Other people do christmas cards. Google is bigger than that. The Corp is giving away, on behalf of its army of advertising partners, $20 million to charities this year.
In their festive message to its partners, Google says, "Because charities are experiencing their toughest year in decades, we have committed $20 million to those who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Happy holidays."
One charity on the list that caught my attention is Reporters Without Borders, who have been critical of the way Google displays search results in China.
The cynic might argue that Google is trying to buy friendship.
But perhaps this is the internet giant's way of offsetting its conscience, kind of like reducing your carbon footprint when you make a transatlantic flight by buying carbon offsets.
Google has been criticised for human rights violations by strictly adhering to the Chinese authorities censorship laws, effectively making it a 21st century state propaganda machine.
Perhaps the most famous example of this in action is in the way that Google filters images when searching for Tiananmen Square, where around 7000 people died (NATO intelligence figure) and thousands more were wounded in the 1989 protests.
See for yourself what Google.com turns up when you search for Tiananmen Square: a black and white image of the bodies of dead students, another black and white image of mangled bodies and bicycles, an image of riots, and twelve copies of the iconic image of the white-shirted student placing himself in front of a line of tanks.
By comparison, searching just moments ago, the images from Google China are straight out of a tourism brochure: Tiananmen Square, Google China. Not a single pic of that iconic shot from Tiananmen Square.
Sadly, the fact is that Google probably wouldn't be in China at all if it didn't filter its searches.
On a related but different issue: Google Images seems to favour the pretty, pretty rather than the gritty, gritty in its choice of images. Do an image search for Vancouver Canada and it's all tourism type images of this fair city.
More specific searches for Vancouver Crack, Vancouver Gang Wars, BC Clear Cut Forest, or Canadian Tar Sands yield you a more realistic picture of a situation.
Most of us know that Google uses link popularity as a major ingredient in its magic search formula. But it does a disservice to give just a series of similar thumbnail images - or the same image again and again.
Unfortunately, Google isn't smart enough yet to amalgamate images in a way that would make its gallery of thumbnails more meaningful and useful. So it would seem the image-makers with the biggest marketing budgets and the SEO savoir-faire are calling the shots. For now, at least.