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Google sold its soul to the Chinese years ago.

This is what Aaron Russo had warned us ,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5BecBtH97M

i wonder how he died.

This is not the only reason Google is evil.

What about AdSense? They don't support third-party click tracking so you can't verify the their numbers with your own ad server. It's also against their rules to modify their ad tags to support it.

What about Analytics? Tell me, if your site has a somewhat high bounce rate or short page viewing times wouldn't it make sense to assume it's not relevant to the keyword searches that led visitors there? Google can track users from search to page exit now with Analytics. That's even worse. No matter what you do you can't improve your ranking and your traffic (and ultimately income) suffer if you get hit by this.

Choose your business partners wisely.

"Evil" is a bit hysterical, isn't it?

Google's business model relies on massive scale & (to enable that) total automation -- so there are going to be some victims of that policy now and again, who fall afoul of the fraud filter, get screwed because of it, and have no good recourse.

Online payment processing in bulk is a very, very difficult business. PayPal actually does pretty well nowadays, from what I understand. Google is going to have to learn all of the painful lessons that PayPal did (that earned them their "evil" tag in the first place...) before they find a balance that works.

I know, the automatic response is "how can they screw over this poor person -- they *need* to have a person she can contact to set this straight!" Of course, that's true (and it's not fair that to recover lost money it seems to basically require going to court), but ALSO remember that Google is constantly shutting down huge numbers of *actually* fraudulent accounts, and any helpline they set up will be deluged with fraudsters trying to smoothtalk their way into pushing a scam through.

The "google" approach is rather to sort out the cases that actually take them to court, ignore the rest, and keep finetuning their algorithms. And cross their fingers that the occasional bad press by someone who got screwed (like this example...) won't get too big.

So, "evil", no. But I'm not using them as a payment processor.

Thats even worse, letting the machines decide who is fraudulent.

The Judgment day has arrived.

Oh, but come on now -- do you really expect them to have a human evaluate billions of possible attempts at fraud? They would make far more errors, and they would have to pay the salaries of all of those people (...and that cost would need to be passed on to the customers). In other words, instead of creating a super-cheap Google service, they'd just be another payment processor that cost the same as the others (i.e., significantly more than PayPal, who also is very largely automated).

I personally think Google needs to create a way that people can appeal this kind of thing -- it will need to have some serious hoops to jump through to weed out the wave of fraudsters that will attempt it, but provide *some* way you can apply to have a real person call you back and evaluate your case.

The title seemed flamebait and I was about to Vote it down until I saw that 66 people had voted it up and nobody voted it down yet.

Then I actually read the blog post and saw the title is pretty justified.

interesting update: http://www.slash7.com/articles/2009/3/28/google-checkout-still-unfit-for-business-i-got-my-money-but-would-you

looks like someone inside google has interceded and reopened her account. trouble is, they make it look like they are just doing it because she made just enough noise so that a human being at google heard her... although i'm sure the people involved had the best intentions. it looks even worse to me now, unfortunately.

Monopoly danger... I wish another SE(s) like Google.