What does Google owe its users?

Following up on a story I mentioned last week:

A US federal judge has denied a government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample keywords, but required the company to produce some web addresses indexed in its system.

In a 21-page ruling, Judge James Ware of the US District for the Northern District of California said the privacy considerations of Google users led him to deny part of the Justice Department's request

[from Australian IT]

As John Soat at InformationWeek points out:

Google really faces no downside by refusing the government's request to turn over search data. Even if Google loses the case and has to turn over some (truncated) amount of (very general) information about a (random) selection of searches, it still wins in the court of public opinion as a defender of personal privacy. As my colleague Chris Murphy put it, Google should take the court costs out of its marketing budget.

I love Google, I use it constantly all day long, I run Google AdSense ads on my sites -- I couldn’t live without it. But is it dangerous to be so reliant on one site, as both a Web surfer and a webmaster? Consider this:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.

The civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, Friday by KinderStart.com seeks financial damages along with information on how Google ranks Internet sites when users conduct a Web-based search.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment but the company aggressively defends the secrecy of its patented search ranking system and asserts its right to adapt it to give customers what it determines to be the best results.

[from Reuters via CNN/Money]

Is it a mistake for us Web users to have put so much power into the hands of one site? Is there any way we could have avoided this situation? How do you avoid using a resouce that is so damn, you know, useful?

I don’t have any answers. But the questions need to be asked.