How CNET Got Banned by Google in 2005 and Won in the End
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
How CNET got banned by Google:
[...] [Elinor Mills] started [at CNET] in 2005 with arguably the hottest beat: internet companies, primarily rising star Google, and Yahoo, which was losing the internet search battle. I'd met Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 1999 when he gave me a desk-side demo of the simple and fast Google search site. By the mid-aughts, the company had come a long way, going public in 2004. The hugely popular Google search was raking in ad revenue, but the fact that Google knew all of our web searches and the content of Gmails had some people worried about privacy risks. I decided that for my first big feature in my new job I'd do a deep dive into Google's services to see if the concerns were justified. The resulting article -- published Aug. 3, 2005, under the headline Google balances privacy, reach -- would be the high-water mark of my journalism career. It certainly wasn't a wash for Google, either. The company's extreme reaction to my story prompted widespread criticism, led to a mini backlash and served as a case study in how not to deal with the media over perceived bad press.
[...] After I pitched the story to my editor, Jim Kerstetter, I spent a month researching and reporting the ins and outs of Google's products and policies, trying to understand what data the company collected and how that info was used. [...] As I was starting to write the article, News Editor Scott Ard stopped by my desk. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he suggested that I google Schmidt to see what types of information I could find.
The linked article is well worth reading, especially on how NOT to deal with the press!
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