Here’s A Hot Topic: Google SideWiki

By Michael | September 30, 2009

Greetings.

Last week, Google introduced a new toolbar. In typical Google fashion, it’s made a huge splash… although it’s probably not the type of feedback that they were looking for.

This new toolbar is called Sidewiki and it gives web browsers the ability to write comments on any website. Now it doesn’t actually write the comments on the webpage. Instead, they are stored on one of Google’s databases somewhere. To use an analogy, it’s like someone putting a big sign in front of a retail store without actually entering the store.

According to Google, the idea is people can post their own “reviews” on different websites based on their experiences. In other words, if they have eaten at a local restaurant, then they can post their experiences on the restaurant’s website for everyone using the SideWiki toolbar to read.

It’s another variation of social media… a portable interactive forum thread, if you will, on any website on the internet. Sounds nice in theory but…

… It creates far more problems than it solves.

First, any comments posted on a webpage are not viewable by that website owner unless they use Google’s Toolbar. Comments are open-ended and can be whatever people choose to post. You can literally see anything from customer reviews to links to porn or spam sites.

Second, website owners are not being given a choice to opt-out of their websites being “defaced”. In addition, website owners are being asked to police their own websites to remove or rebuke any harmful, slanderous, or socially unacceptable statements. That leads into an even bigger problem.

Third, many online entrepreneurs own more than one website… sometimes it’s dozens of active websites with hundreds of webpages spread across all of them. This adds a massive amount of work to moderate all of those pages… time-consuming work that would have to be done by the website owner or outsourced to a paid freelancer.

I wish the bad news ended strictly with website owners… but it doesn’t.

Since the SideWiki has no parental controls and can be installed on any computer, the opportunity for young children to be exposed to pornographic or spam messages and links, on any websites that they visit, is virtually endless.

In my opinion, the amount of damage that could be caused by spammers and unethical folks is unlimited by this toolbar… damage to private website owners and to the general public who will be exposed to all types of spam and other junk.

Think I’m biased? Maybe… but I’m not alone.

Here are the comments already in Google’s forum about this new tool. You’ll notice the majority of the commentary is very much against this tool being made available. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?fid=65cd1ca77affd341000474c9a1a3a04d&hl=en

Steve Diamond, a very sharp programmer pointed out another problem with SideWiki: Unless Google is paying strict attention to every site’s TOS and licensing, every time they create one of these special URLs they’re stealing an entire site’s content and displaying it under the google.com domain.
http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/103503649576542905957/id/ca2rkl2nFEAHPhoimCLNWNodXI0

Try the above link. Then click on some internal links in Wikipedia. Works fine, doesn’t it?

Not exactly. Take a look at your browser’s location bar. It still says http://www.google.com.

This is a far cry from the short excerpts Google scrapes for display on their search pages. That’s arguably “fair use” and it’s possible for webmasters to opt out via robots.txt placed in their website’s main directory. But this new practice looks awfully like wholesale theft of entire websites to me.

Personally, as someone who considers himself an ethical online marketer, this toolbar represents a serious threat to my personal and family’s livelihood. I also view it as potentially harmful to the general public at large.

Here’s what I suggest: Tell Google what YOU think:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?fid=65cd1ca77affd341000474c9a1a3a04d&hl=en

With enough constructive feedback, maybe Google will modify their SideWiki so that no one comes out on the losing end.

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Here’s A Hot Topic: Google SideWiki

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