Google’s new toolbar (which is still in beta) has caused a bunch of kerfuffle with its new AutoLink feature. AutoLink does to Web pages what Microsoft wanted to do with its Smart Tags nearly five years ago. Every time you visit a page, the toolbar checks to see whether anything on the page looks like an address, or a book’s ISBN number (which identifies it in online catalogs), or a FedEx or UPS tracking number.
If it finds anything in those classes of information, it changes the AutoLink toolbar button to read Show Map or Show Book Info. You click the button on the new Google toolbar and – auto-magically! – it changes the addresses, ISBN numbers, or what-have-you to links. Book links take you to Amazon.com, map links take you to Google Maps (unless you open the Options dialog box and change the setting to point to Yahoo Maps or Mapquest instead).
Just for fun, I visited the Web site of Book Soup, a wonderful independent bookseller in Hollywood. The home page lists more than 50 top-selling signed books, each with an ISBN number in the write-up. Links at the top of the page take you to listing of in-store evenets, including upcoming book signings that feature Joan Collins, Jane Fonda, and Lauren Bacall. Each write-up has a biography of the author and an ISBN number for the book that author will sign. In my browser window, a few pixels above the Book Soup logo on each oif these pages, is the Google toolbar with its enticing button that reads Show Book Info. Click it, and all of the Book Soup ISBNs get turned into links to the same book at Amazon.com. If you owned an independent bookstore, how would you like someone giving your visitors a tool that fills your carefully designed pages with links that point to your biggest competitor?
It was a bad idea when Microsoft first toyed with this technology five years ago, and it’s a bad idea now. The grand high poobah of Blogostan asks a few highly relevant questions:
… Google hasn’t drawn any kind of line, saying where this can’t go. And consider what heat would be generated if what Google is doing to us were done to Google. Can I put up a Web app that scrapes Google and replaces their ads with mine, or adds mine to theirs? Could Microsoft? Could AP or the New York Times? When you take that first step down the slope, take a good look at what’s further down the hill, because you’re going there for sure.
Microsoft’s chief envoy to the blogosphere doesn’t like it either:
I believe that anything that changes the linking behavior of the Web is evil. Anything that changes my content is evil. Particularly anything that messes with the integrity of the link system. And I do see this as a slippery slope. Today users have to jump through hoops to use this feature. What about tomorrow?
There are those who disagree, of course. James Robertson, for instance:
I simply can’t get worked up over AutoLink. Given appropriate tools, I can decide whether I want to see pop ups or not. Google is providing me with a tool that lets me decide whether I want to see related information or not. Heck, I might as well rage against paid placement. Scoble blathers on and on about how AutoLink is an evil idea. Winer has been going on and on about it as well. I’ll say the same thing I say to people who can’t figure out the “change channel” or “off” switch on a TV or radio – you don’t have to view/hear/read the content.
The trouble is, Microsoft owns the browser, and Google owns the search space. (Yes, both have competitors, but both have dominant market positions.) As the publisher of a Web site, I don’t want a third party messing with my content. If you own the browser or the search engine, please present my page to the reader as I created it. Readers may choose to do whatever they want with my pages. They can apply a different stylesheet, make the fonts bigger or smaller, or use a utility to selectively block ads. But put those tools in the reader’s hands, please, and don’t encourage them to change my content by adding links that I didn’t create.
Now, there is a very easy way for Google to get out of this mess. Change the behavior of the AutoLink toolbar so that it doesn’t change the page. Go ahead and identify addresses and ISBNs and so on, and give me a tool to look them up. Then put the results in a custom Explorer bar on the left side of the browser. That way, the integrity of the page remains intact, and it is crystal clear that the information in the sidebar is being provided by someone else. That’s how other Internet Explorer add-ons do it. The best example I can think of is SideStep’s travel tool, which looks up airfares, hotel rates, and car rental information whenever I visit a travel-related site. It would be outrageous if they rewrote a Web page from Expedia or Travelocity to insert links to their results, and they don’t. Instead, the SideStep toolbar shows me alternatives in a region of the screen that clearly belongs to them. I can select options from the page I choce to visit, or I can look at the alternatives that SideStep is presenting me. And no one is likely to be confused.
Why can’t Google work the same way?
[Updated to fix a minor error and clear up some confusing remarks about the Book Soup site.]
Ed Bott 
That’s a sound solution, and for those who like it, such an app would generate a fair amount of buzz. Unless I was writing a research report or a study, I’m one of the few humans who did not fall in love with Microsoft’s SmartTags. It seems to me that following using the bookstore example, most autolink will quickly devolve into the link equivalent of a popup, and would turn the reading of many pages into an act of sadism.
The sidebar solution is certainly a winner… but I would also recommend a feature that allows the “smart tags” to be disabled by HTML tags on the target website.
So if I am a bookseller, I can put google tags=’no’ or somesuch in my HTML meta tags so that my customers remain my customers.
I think some folks have already come up with an opt-out script, but it would be better if that option came from Google. And even better yet if there were a standard “don’t mess with my tags” tag so I don’t need to remember to put 23 opt-out tags in the header of every page I create!
“Every time you visit a page, the toolbar checks to see whether anything on the page looks like an address, or a books ISBN number (which identifies it in online catalogs), or a FedEx or UPS tracking number.”
Ed, you make it sound like the toolbar automagically checks a page for those things. That is wrong. The user has to manually click on the AutoLink button to look for those things. I do agree that Google should include options as to how the links are presented, but ultimately how and where the links are presented should rest with the user.
Mousky, I think the behavior of the toolbar is different now than it was then, but I don’t have the old version so I can’t say for sure.