...with knowledge sharing.

Google wants to catalog the world's information. Like the traditional catalogers, librarians, Google wants to help us find information. Google teaches how the card catalog is composed, the different ways to search it (title, author, subject – remember?). So far, so good. But then Google finds itself in a quandary: it is afraid bad people out there will try to harm the catalog. So Google the librarian, dutifully teaching us how the catalog is updated, how we can help is conflicted with the Google who whats to keep everything in the “special collections area”.

Consider a few examples, starting with link tool, link:www.mysite.com. When a company of Google's stature decides it can no longer provide accurate results because said results are subject to misuse, they are faced with three choices:

• withdraw the tool,
• cripple it, documenting the fact,
• cripple it.

I believe Google choose the 3rd option, rending the tool not only useless, but also highly misleading, doing a disservice to both Google's users and Google itself.

This same lack of transparency plagues other Google initiatives such as the otherwise excellent sitemaps (Google webmaster dashboard) program. While I don't believe in pagerank size queens, there it is in the middle of the stats, pagerank distribution for site pages. Certainly clients ask about it. Too bad no one seems to know how often, if ever, it is updated? Is it on the same every three months or so as the toolbar timeline?

In February, the sitemaps team announced the inclusion of “Common Words” stats. What they didn't say is that this information is only available for some sites, presumably better performing sites. There have been vague notes of “...as we find out more about your site...” which imparts a false hope that it is just an issue of a bit of patience. While Google needs to limit where it expends computing resources, they have set up a certain false expectation though poor, opaque, communication.

Google Suggest, now in the browser toolbar (at least for Firefox) implies a certain freshness by providing real time suggestions. While it is understandable that Google needs to cache queries, I'm seeing the same data I saw 6 months ago (admittedly for non-English terms). If the actual data was compiled 6 months ago, a year ago, fine. But please say so.

So, back to the Trends tool, while without doubt it is very interesting, my doubt is how accurate is it really? Are the skew factors sector specific? Country specific? Will they cripple it further?

Who's wining the internal debate on transparency?