The discovery places an ominous tone on a seemingly innocuous statement made by CEO Eric Shmidt in an August 2004 article about the company’s IPO.
When asked about “Don’t be evil,” the Google corporate motto, Schmidt said, “Evil is what [co-founder] Sergey [Brin] says it is.”
Typically, Google frowns deeply on both cloaking, the act of displaying one web page to surfers and a different one to bots, and keyword stuffing, or placing a ton of similar keywords within a page in order to artificially increase its page rank. In fact, Google’s own guidelines warn webmasters that either activity could result in a permanent ban from the Google index.
A look at the source code of both this page about AdWords policies and a cached version of the same page that Google has since removed seem to bear out the accusations.
While the title of the non-cached version that users typically see reads, “Google AdWords Support: Why do traffic estimates for my Ad Group differ from those given by the standalone tool,” the title of the cached version, the one that is displayed to search engine bots as they spider sites, reads, “traffic estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google AdWords Support.”
What the implications of a corporate entity like Google, which has a fiduciary duty to its stock holders and, therefore, a right to tailor its engine to make money, violating its own terms of service are unclear, as is whether Google even did something wrong.
The page in question was one of Google’s own help pages and not competing for ranks with outside pages.
“Looks to me like they’re using the technique internally to file things orderly, since they’re generating content that directly populates the database,” wrote Slashdotter Mr. Z. “The nice, handy newline between the keywords and the actual title in the HTML source also makes it trivial for scripts to strip it out later. If they were trying to hide something, they’d teach their cacher to delete the ‘secret’ keyword.”
“Absolutely,” responded pbranes. “People tend to forget that Google is a corporation. They can do whatever they want with their search engine. Their goal in life is to keep you looking at their pages and using their search engine so that they can show you more ads. It’s all about money.”
Google was unavailable for comment at deadline and had not issued a statement about the source code or why they removed the page.
