Tall Poppy Syndrome

Tesco are taking a bit of a hammering in the press at the moment about all their failings, a lot of which is based around customer experience but Tesco haven't changed, they were always like this.  If they weren't they would only be as successful as as company with good customer service like Sainsburys, so why start moaning about them now? 


Google are taking a bigger hammering in the blogging community.  Lots of bloggers are complaining bitterly about Google's policy on paid links.  This is often leading to a general moan about the dominance of Google and their dictatorial ways with users.  This confuses me.  I wouldn't expect to be able to go into Marks&Sparks and put up a stall selling my homemade cakes for profit without them getting a bit put out.  Why do we expect Google to do the same?  They make their money by advertising,  why would they allow anyone to redirect their possible income through blog pages and often blog pages hosted on their own infrastructure? Why would they want the integrity of their search results to be compromised by allowing mass purchasing of page rank?

We expect so much of the Internet to be given to us for free but then complain when the rules aren't going our way. 

So is it tall poppy syndrome?  Have we just fallen out of love with the likes of Tesco and Google because they are now so successful or once a company gets so big do we expect more for less?

If you're falling out of love with Google tell them.  How?  The same as your blog, they know their hit rate, they have to to sell the advertising space.  There are hundreds of search engines out there and lots of people use them.

I'm particularly enjoying DuckDuckGo right now and their Bang Syntax is a beaut.  DDG don't collect any data about me and don't use any profiling to return results which I think makes it better when I am doing technical searches for work. 

Dogpile is making a bit of a come back but it doesn't look as clean as DDG. Yahoo didn't die and bing is always reliable.

So if you feel Google are being really harsh right now by making some rules about how to use the 1 million plus servers it provides for free use then in the same way you can choose the type of supermarket service you want to receive, choose your search engine.  To 'google' may have become a verb but don't think that means you have to type google.com in the url.