Chip expert says Google threatened to blacklist his sites

A top semiconductor industry analyst says Google threatened to blacklist his Web sites when he complained about a new site of his not showing up in search results. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research tells the story like this in his "The Chip Insider" newsletter:

"In the past, when you launched a website, or Google wasn't picking up your stuff, you could call the friendly people over there and they'd look at your website to see if you were legit, look at their search results, and adjust their code appropriately. It used to be this all occurred in the same day. Then it was 24 hours. So, imagine our dismay when www.wesrch.com wasn't even being picked up two weeks after we launched. We had called Google two days into the launch and they apologized, saying their search engines were backlogged with so many sites to monitor. We called after a week and then called again and again, with no better answer. We even tried posting ads with Google and they couldn't find us. "Clearly, we had tried their patience, as in the end they threatened to BLACKLIST our websites so no one would ever find us again. Now is that power or what? Funny thing is, Yahoo found us faster and more reliably. So, Google is no longer my home page. More importantly, they are showing all the signs of a monopolist trying to forcibly extract revenues for nothing. Whenever this happens, it's a sign that revenue growth has peaked and they are trying to force it in order to maintain high stock valuations. So watch out if you are an investor," he wrote in the newsletter item earlier this month.

A Google representative, who asked not to be identified, responded to an e-mail seeking comment to Hutcheson's complaints with this statement: "Our intent is to represent the content of the Internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. While there's no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase a site's chances of showing up in our search results." That was followed by some links to Google Web pages that Webmasters can use for submitting URLs.

Hutcheson called the Google statement marketing communications "propaganda" that didn't address the real complaint. Google is "again sidestepping the point that their service is declining and that at least someone on their technical support staff openly threatens to blacklist Webmasters that bug them too much," he said. "My only real complaint at this juncture is that the company is getting away from the management and investors should be aware there could be long-term implications given the current valuation."