In this day and age, the term “Google it” is synonymous with finding out any term, phrase, or pretty much anything that you don’t know. The infamous site will take your word or phrase of words and find pretty much anywhere on the internet that it says that sequence of words. It is the key to information. In addition, it is no question that Google takes president over its inferior search engines, such as MSN, Yahoo, or others. Google is the premiere search engine. Without search engines, the internet would still have its uses, but it would not be as useful as it is. Researchers would be very limited, and students would have to settle with long visits to the library. This heavy reliance on Google makes one wonder as to whether Google has too much power than they should.
Google determines which product provider comes up when you search to buy a product, which pictures come up as a result of a certain key word, and pretty much makes your decisions for you. If they didn’t have a good relationship with certain outlets for products, Google could burry that company so that they wouldn’t receive any consumer traffic through search engines. On a more radical assessment, if the people of North Koreans search their leader, Kim Jong-il, they would find pictures of him appearing as a compassionate, fearless leader, while Americans can “Google” him to find satirical pictures of him as a communist leader under a negative light. This goes to show that search engines can be manipulated to keep certain content in the shadows from a specific population.
This brings about the real question. What is Google hiding from us? Though they may not be hiding anything now, they could surely do so in the future. This leads us to believe that Google has become a sort of internet monopoly. The government needs to keep a keen eye on the developments of Google as Google has a hand in almost everything: Google search engine, Maps, YouTube, Double Click, Google Mail, social media’s Google Plus, and much more.