Yet another example of Google’s power to manipulate what the Internet sees and what it doesn’t has just surfaced thanks to those sites, that are not (yet?) hosted on Google. It seems Google is laying engineers off (no big deal – many companies are these days, Microsoft just did) and is also trying to hide the information about it in its own search results and on Google News pages. Read the source.

Now, I was positing Google can do the same with political or social views its owners don’t agree with. I was ridiculed by those who still believe in Google’s slick PR front. But the truth is that power corrupts and huge power corrupts greatly. For Google the temptation to manipulate the content stream that passes through them was just too big. And this just proves how bad it is for the public if content streams are monopolized.

And it also shows that corporations are just corporations. Google always tried to be “cool” to hide the reality of what it was becoming, but in the end there is no escaping it. When bad times strike there is no “cool” anymore – there is just the almighty balance sheet. And attempts to hide it are both scary – and pathetic.