Google’s entry into the English languages (and others?) as a “verb”:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=google illustrates how high on a pedestal their brand stands. However, as history has “shown”:http://www.gigaom.com/2005/03/26/how-yahoo-got-its-mojo-back/, the higher up you are, the further you have to fall.

How does a downfall start? Well, for one thing, you make vague, grandiose, inflammatory and overly-broad “statements”:http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html like, “You can make money without doing evil.” I, like a lot of people I imagine, are probably a little confused by this concept. What exactly does Google mean in it’s use of “evil?” I think that it’s only naturally that people are going to interpret this in the broadest sense possible — which really places Google in a bind.

Take Google’s “autolinking”:http://toolbar.google.com/T3/index feature. Currently, it’s pretty innocuous, since it’s primary function is turning non-linked addresses on web pages into links to Google Maps. However, this feature shares some similarities to Microsoft’s ill-fated, never-launched “Smart Tags”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/smarttags/ — a “feature” which would have added Microsoft-controlled links to web pages by default. One could have made a very strong case that Smart Tags was “evil,” since Microsoft was unfairly leveraging it’s monopoly in browser share to influence web traffic. Now by association — however slim the analogy — Google’s Autolink starts to feel like “evil”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/19/corys_it_conversatio.html.

Google could have avoided a lot of this controversy by never making references to “evil.” Imprecise and controversial concepts don’t belong in company mission statements, since they only incur downsides, not upsides. Just ask “GW”:http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:hiMBEZhtMzIJ:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1796034.stm+%22axis%20of%20evil%22&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8.

_*Update: 2005_03_28*_
Here’s a few more links on the building Google backlash:
Dan Gillmor’s “_Google and Transparency_”:http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/03/google_and_tran.html
Jeff Jarvis’ “_Google Nazis_”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_03_24.html#009332
ITConversations audio “show”:http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail438.html on Autolink
Roger Simon’s “_Is Google Progressive or Reactionary?_”:http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/03/is_google_progr.php

Deeeaaamn, I hate it when you go to a site like “Yahoo! Finance”:http://finance.yahoo.com/, and they don’t have the default focus of the cursor set to the search box… you know, like when you go to “Google”:http://www.google.com and you don’t have to mouse to the search box, you can just start typing your query. Ironically, it works on Yahoo!’s home “page”:http://www.yahoo.com.

Who’s in “charge”:http://www.sitcomsonline.com/charlesinchargecast2.jpg of sites like finance.yahoo.com? Do they think that by not setting the cursor, that I am more likely to look at the ads? I’ll look at the ads if they interest me, thank you, regardless of where the cursor is. Or perhaps — worse yet — do they just not *Get It*?

Yahoo!, if you are going to have a stand-alone site like finance.yahoo.com — which represents an “important sub-brand”:http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20050131005415&newsLang=en — then make it work right, or you’re just wrecking your brand.