I love Google. Unabashedly. Even though it really messed up several of my writing streams of revenue with the Panda updates, even though I get very annoyed at it thinking it knows better than I do what I want (though that has either calmed down a bit, or I've gotten used to it), still, I love it.
Google gets me.
As an excellent example, quite some time ago I was trying to recall the name of a movie I'd seen. I knew there were two kids in it, something about black rocks, and in the end there were aliens that came and took the kids away. So I Googled "movie black rocks aliens take kids". Bam! Right there on the first page of results was the movie ("Knowing", if you hadn't figured it out already). I tried the same search on Bing (this was when Bing first came out) -- I got through 10 pages of results without finding any reference to the actual correct movie before I quit.
Granted, this was several years ago now and the search engines have improved (or there's been more information/searching for that movie); today a Google search brings up the correct movie in the first four results, and again a few later, so five of ten results; Bing has the correct movie in the first and fourth result, but that's the only time of the first ten.
At any rate, I've always had very good luck with Google, and often find things that others have trouble locating. (Honestly, I'm not being immodest by saying that I kind of have a reputation for being the one who can always find things online.)
Lately, however, my love affair with Google is starting to feel a little creepy. Google is stalking me. I say this because whenever I search for something that has any commercial value, it's just about guaranteed that within the next few days I'll start getting spam email regarding that topic. Last month I had a tax client who sold a condo they co-owned with three other couples, and had used both personally and as a rental. I was researching the proper tax treatment of the sale, and looked at how timeshares are treated since this was essentially the same thing. Suddenly, I started getting a lot of emails along the lines of "Sell Your Timeshare Fast" and "We Buy Timeshares", etc. We bought a foreclosure home recently, and I was looking up some of the details about that process -- of course, now I'm inundated with foreclosure spam.
Granted, I've gotten spam about timeshares and foreclosures regularly for years -- but it seems to pick up in intensity after a Google search. We had to get a new laundry tub a few months ago, and I looked at several options because we decided to make it a dog grooming tub, as well. Sure enough, now I'm getting spam about tubs (and walk-in tubs for people, which I did accidentally click on a few times in my search). I looked into home warranties recently, and now I get spam about home warranties every day.
The interesting -- and creepier still -- thing is that the spam doesn't come to my Google-associated email. It comes to the email I have listed as a "back-up" in case my primary address isn't working.
I will acknowledge that there is the possibility that I've been getting this spam all along, and just have become more aware of it after I've done a search for something. I haven't taken the time to catalog how many spam messages I received on a subject before and after searching for it. It just seems quite coincidental, and of course the conspiracy theorist in me shouts 'Of course Google is stalking you! What do you expect? They're probably reporting all of your online activity back to The Man, too!'. (I try to keep my inner conspiracy theorist quiet, but sometimes she just breaks free.)
Even if Google isn't really stalking me, the fact that I'm even thinking it is means there's something wrong in our relationship. I don't trust Google like I used to, and that's kind of sad....
