Guilty or Not? The 10 Most Ridiculous Things Blamed On Google

“Search-” the first thing comes to our mind when we think Google. But, the Universal search giant has always been dragged into many cases, which are not even related to any of its business and was forced to serve as a scapegoat for a number of bad incidents happened across the globe.
Even the situations have gone to an extend which made Eric Schimdt ,former GoogleCEO, admit that, “Google had become accustomed to taking blame for almost everything- Terrorist attacks, Child pornography, market share drops, stolen property and a lot more.”
Let’s have a look at the 10 most ridiculous things blamed on the search giant compiled by Complextech.
# 10 Rupert Murdoch Blames Google for Newspaper Decline
 Date: April 11, 2010
The company, entirely responsible for the downfall of news paper industry was turned out to be Google, at least for Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation founder. He accused the tech giant for taking the content from his media empire and other publishers, without giving any royalties. Google, the believer of “open web,” replied by saying that it has pushed the traffic to all the sites of News Corp. Murdoch in turn implemented a new paying system for readers to access the contents of his site like the Wall Street Journal.

# 09 Google Maps Error Lead to Costa Rican Invasion
Date: November 5, 2010
In 2010, Nicaraguan troops Commander Eden Pastora lead his troops and invaded a part of Costa Rica, which he thought belongs to Nicaragua. He even took down the Costa Rican flag and raised a Nicaraguan one. Later Pastora and the government officials blamed Google for the error in Google maps which lead them to the accidental invasion. Google in turn blamed U.S. state department for providing faulty border data.

#8 Zuckerberg Blamed Google for Bad Facebook Android App
Date: November 3, 2010
Mark Zuckerberg was the next one blaming Google for releasing the Facebook app for Android, which he found unpolished and bug filled. He even called Google “obnoxious” for hiring an outside developer to make the app. “obviously, it was not a huge deal. But it definitely set us back for a while,” he said. “The Facebook’s in-house development team could have done that work,” he added.

#7 Porn Companies Blame Google for Underage Porn Viewers
Date: February 15, 2008
Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment blamed Google for not updating its porn filters and age verification tools, thereby making children to be exposed, to materials intended only for adults. This porn Kingpin even offered his hand to work with the companies to make it difficult for children to be more exposed to porn content. He said Google and Yahoo to erect “strong barriers” for this.

#6 Google Played for 700 MHz Spectrum Auction Shortfall
Date: April 15, 2008
Republicans Cliff Stearns and John Shimkus, along with Democrat Eliot Engel accused Google for deliberately manipulating the outcome of the FCC's (Federal Communications Commission) 700 MHz spectrum auction. The company is accused for discouraging the candidates from placing bids and causing a $10 billion lose to the FCC.

#5 Yahoo Blames Google for Market Share Dip
Date: October 14, 2010
Yahoo failed to perform well in last year’s ComScore report on market share value, and Sashi Seth, the Senior VP of Yahoo! search and marketplaces could find only one reason for that- Google. He accused Google of giving the research firm misleading figures and manipulating the search counts with its new automated search results format, Google Instant. OK, leave all that, what about the 200 million less queries Yahoo generated compared to Google at that time? Atleast he did not blame Google for that too.

#4 Entertainment Industry Calls Google “Enabler of Piracy”
Date: December 9, 2010
Taylor Hackford, the keynote speaker at Entertainment Content Protection Summit called Google an “Enabler,” who facilitate the illegal activity by allowing people to download pirated content from the torrent sites and thereby making money from it. Some days later, the British Pornographic Industry shared the same view of Taylor Hackford and suggested that Google should sensor the search results by listing accredited sites at the top.

#3 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks
Date: December 9, 2009
One of the captured terrorist in the Mumbai attack admitted to using Google earth as an aid, which in turn forced the Indian officials to send a petition to the court for banning the virtual map system from Google, claiming that the company has “no controls or limit access to prevent the misuse of the service.” John Haske, the Google earth VP defended by saying that “Google is not responsible and evilness is in the desires and philosophies of those who want to do evil, with every tool they get in hand.”

#2 The Unrest in Egypt
Date: February 22, 2011
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Russian deputy prime minister and energy minister blamed Google for unrest in Egypt, accusing the search giant of "manipulations of the energy of the people". He found Google responsible for everything happening with Hosni Mubarak. "Look what they have done in Egypt, those highly-placed managers of Google, what manipulations of the energy of the people took place there," he said in the interview.

#1 Milkman’s Bike Stolen by Google Street View Thieves
Gordon Rayner, a milkman from Brackendale Parade has accused Google’s street view website, claiming that it helped the burglars to steal his mountain bike from his garage, after they spot the door open through the online service. He said referring the photograph appeared in Street View, "When you look at the photograph, my face is blacked out, the windows of my house are blacked out but because the garage door was left open, you can clearly see everything in there.”