Is the honeymoon over for Google™? I hadn’t given the issue much thought until I read this article in Wired a few months back. Now, I’m beginning to think that Wired had remarkable timing on the subject.

Google™ is generally perceived to be one of the good guys. It reliably finds what we’re looking for. It accepts advertising, but it doesn’t try to trick us when the ads are presented. As an employer, it remains a company that thinks work should be fun and whose employees are able to think that they can change the world.

But Google™ is heavily dependent upon good will. It’s technology is good, but probably not that much better than the competition. It’s the dominant search site, but we’ve all had enough experience with monopolies (benign or otherwise) to distrust single source anything. It is the best, because we’ve placed our trust in it and we allow it to be the best.

It seems to me that trust is eroding. The letter to wordspy is the quite possibly the mildest legal correspondence that I’ve ever read. Some perceive this to be bullying, others perceive it to be lawyers behaving badly. A year or two back, I think Google™ would have been given more slack.