The troubles with Google that I’ve faced—privacy breaches, Ads Preferences Manager not honouring its claims, fighting for six months on behalf of a friend over a deleted Blogger blog, Chrome being buggy (but not nearly as badly as IE9), phantom entries in my Google dashboard, unanswered messages—would suggest, to anyone studying business or a graduate from B-school, that there is something very, very rotten inside the company. It’s being evil.
   Judging by an article I linked yesterday from Techcrunch, there probably is something rotten.
   It’s sad to see that Techcrunch didn’t have the ethics to keep an off-the-record comment off the record—it even plays an answerphone message on its site, which I am sure its speaker never intended for broadcast—but it does make an interesting guess of the company’s internal problems.
   I’ve heard of similar things second-hand and, in at least one case, first-hand, but this one illustrates that the problems could be at quite a senior level.
   With all the internal politicking going on, a few people are doing their jobs correctly, and honouring Google’s commitment to its users. In 2010, I named Rick Klau at Blogger as being one of them. I reckon the other has to be Matt Cutts, whose initiative to cut down content mills and Google-spam I applauded some weeks ago as being one of the company’s right moves.
   Matt has done his job so well that it has cut down even Google’s own content mill, the Google Places site.
   He deserves even more applause because he’s not singling out his own employers for special treatment, which means, as far as the rest of us are concerned, we face a level playing field getting on the site.
   He’s even stated, ‘Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google.’
   What is interesting is that it has pissed off certain people inside Google, who have become accustomed to the search engine biasing results toward itself—something it has admitted on some occasions, contradicting its stated policy on other occasions. Élitism much?
   Among the content mills Matt’s team has targeted includes the sites of Demand Media, who I had a run-in with as well over contradictory terms and conditions and the company’s refusal to respond. (In fact, it continued to pester me to integrate an account I had with a firm it had acquired even though, legally, under its own terms, I could not.)
   Reading the Techcrunch piece, Matt Cutts is a hero for fairness and for running things exactly the way netizens expect. Some commenters agree. He might even be the guy who saves Google from being an élitist, unethical monster. He’s done exactly what he set out to do, and Google needs to realize that if it is to recover any mana for its misdeeds of the past few years, it has to clean its own doorstep first.
   If the article is correct, other Google senior staff—Nikesh Arora, Marissa Mayer (who has already revealed that Google publishes biased results)—are part of the problem, and why Google is so desperate to violate its own stated policies repeatedly.
   And if that off-the-record comment on Techcrunch is accurate, then Marissa Mayer probably believes that users are stupid. Way to earn that goodwill, Marissa.