When your humble mission is to merely "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and you happen to be doing a pretty good job of it, there seems to be a tendency to perturb government officials about how you are going about this perceived public service in a private way.
Yes, let out the collective "poor Google", sigh. Poor Google who has a BusinessWeek cover story asking this week if they are "too powerful."
But, c'mon folks. Last week's public accusation by Congressman Brad Miller that Google was party to "airbrushing history" because Google Maps swapped some post-Katrina images of New Orleans with some pre-Katrina ones makes you sympathize with the search leader. The claim had the tone of blogs who made similar claims about the photos as long ago as last October.
Officially, Google registered their surprise at the accusations on the company's blog and provided a reasonable, if classically geeky, response (changes were driven by the desire for better photo resolution). They also pointed people to a repository of Katrina photos taken for Google Earth that have always remained up.
If you read the Google blog post and do some reflect a bit on the impact of Google, it's also not hard to assume that if the company had not come around with their bold goals and mission, there might be a dearth of publicly available photos of Katrina right now to argue about. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.
Then again, if you're that important and are a key component of providing the public record on everything from the banal to historical moments, than you can expect unprecedented levels of scrutiny.
Regardless, in this case, I just wish Congressman Miller or staffers on the House Committee for Science and Technology that he chairs had either privately contacted Google to get a satisfactory response or toned down the rhetoric.
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