An Open Letter to Google

Miel van Opstal has an excellent open letter to Google over at Coolzor today. The letter's pretty lengthy, but does a great job of highlighting the issues at hand over the Google/China censorship issues. It also includes some interesting notes about changes that Google has made on their site about their stance on censorship and hand manipulation of search results.

A few snippets:

I never thought you would give in to the claims of governments to hide information. What is there left now to be trusted if even search is being manipulated? How can I be ever sure that what you display to me as a result for the queries I’ve entered is real, complete and fully objective?

The fact you removed your statement about your belief in the democracy of the web hurts me a lot. You could’ve just added ‘except in China’ or something, but no. You took down the entire statement. We know now you do censor results, but does it also means the content of your results will no longer be completely automated? Does it mean you will manipulate search results by hand? Does it mean you no longer believe strongly in the democracy of the web? Will ranking be affected by your decision? I’m not sure how big of a sell-out that exactly is. But it seems rather huge. I totally lost my faith in you guys. I don’t know how else to put it.

Read the full letter at Coolzor.

(Found via Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped)