A Few Google Misconceptions

1. Google Desktop indexes your files and uploads the index to Google servers.
Not until you ask google to do so. Google stores index on your own computer and will send them to the google server securely only when you enable search across computer.


2. Gmail indexes your emails and makes them available for everyone.
No, Google indexes your mails so that you can search them just like other email services (yahoo, rediff etc.)


3. Google doesn't delete my Gmail messages.
For safe storage google makes multiple backups of your emails.
"You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems." (Gmail Privacy Policy)


4. Google doesn't improve search anymore to increase its earnings from ads.
You may not see it in short time periods but google does tweak its algorithms to improve search results.


5. Search results should be ranked by people, not by algorithms.
Ask yourself, will you rank every google search result? I won't.


6. Google is spyware.
Spyware is "any software that covertly gathers user information through the user's Internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes. Spyware applications are typically bundled as a hidden component of freeware or shareware programs that can be downloaded from the Internet. Once installed, the spyware monitors user activity on the Internet and transmits that information in the background to someone else. ..."Softwares like google toolbar and google desktop do send information to google servers for personalized working of the software for your computing environment. Google does protect this information from third party but still the problem lies in what does google do with this information.


7. Google Earth shows real-time images.
No, what you see "are photographs taken by satellites and aircraft sometime in the last three years".


8. Google is the best search engine that will ever be built.
Google's goal is to be the best, and it has achieved that to some extent. Still the market is big and competition is tough.


9. Google favors Wikipedia, Technorati, blogs.
No, the simple answer is that such sites have many backlinks to them.


10. Google will take over the world.
My wishes to them.