The Google Guys prepare to be probed.

Google Braces for Antitrust Investigation   

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched an antitrust probe into some of the inner workings of Google's search and advertising systems similar to the antitrust case that nearly killed Microsoft and trod hard on the dreams of one Mr William Gates III, driving him out of his own company with a defeated look on his face.

And now it's the turn of the Crew from Mountain View (*patents*) who are getting too successful, it seems, for their own good. The FTC say they want to make sure Google isn't profiting unfairly through it's black-box AdWords advertising programme and that it isn't flaunting its monopoly too much by pushing Google services to the top of searches. In addition, the FTC says it needs to make sure that the search results are as 'natural' as Google claims that they are and they aren't tweaked by algorithms which push Google products and services ahead of competitors.

Also in the news this week, French search outfit 1plusV charged the Mountain View-based advertising monolith with using its market position to "cripple" their abilities to grow their search services, demanding 295 million euros in compensation.

This continues a long string of Government intervention into Google's operations. In May, South Korean police raided the offices of Google in Seoul looking for evidence of privacy law infringements related to the acquired AdMob mobile advertising software.

In November 2010, Google settled a lawsuit against it after its new Buzz application started publishing who GMail users contacted most recently. Cue lots of irate spouses and probably many divorces...

And prior to the Buzz furore, there was the Street View Data Slurp fiasco. Did you know that while photographing your street, the Google photo vans were also reading your emails? The vans had equipment and software on board them which read all information from unsecured WiFi connections and stored the data for later retrieval. At first Google said this didn't happen. Then it said it was a mistake. Then it claimed a rogue hacker within the company had "planted" the data-sucking software into the Street View vans. Either way, many countries (as many as 30!) are miffed at this invasion of privacy for normal citizens in their homes. Especially the Germans.

People are losing faith in Google rather quickly. They've grown three times as fast as Microsoft did, lost the consumer's faith in half the time and might just be about to dwindle at twice the speed.

The underlying problem is scarily at the heart of every successful business. You have to decide whether to be a leader or a follower and once you've cornered the market it makes sense to try and be the leader. But you need to be careful. The thing I hated most about Windows Vista was the fact it thought it knew best. And it didn't. It made setting up networks a million times more difficult than it was with XP.

In the same vein, Google thought it knew best when it launched Buzz. The ability to see "recent contacts" is actually quite useful in a social framework, but Buzz sprouted up from GMail, which isn't a social network at all. Who you email and who you want to be seen being social with are two very different scopes and should never be mixed.

Now with $8.5m put aside to teach users about privacy and how Google uses data, perhaps Larry and Sergey need to also put some training cash aside to teach a little bit of common sense to those inside the Googleplex.