By most accounts it was a charming service, even though the bride and groom wore swimsuits. When Sergey Brin, the 33-year-old billionaire co-founder of Google, married Anne Wojcicki, earlier this month, they exchanged vows on a sandbar off the Bahamas. He wore black shorts; she a white bikini.

One guest described the Caribbean scene as “beautifully colourful”. Yet such is the state of Google’s reputation that even the public disclosure of an event as happy as the Brin nuptials provoked mutterings of dark conspiracy.

It was not until last Tuesday that the internet search giant confirmed that the rumoured wedding had taken place in secret three weeks ago. But the news accompanied the disclosure that Google has invested almost $4m in 23andme, a fledgling biotechnology company co-founded by Wojcicki that is interested in the human genome.

For a firm whose online advertising revenues exceeded $3.5 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, the investment was the financial equivalent of a speck of Bahamian sand. Yet that did not stop a flurry of internet debate about whether there was anything alarming about the company’s interest in genetics.

Like Microsoft before it, Google is starting to suffer a little blowback. It is still wildly popular for its search engine and expanding range of free internet services, but a paranoia, variously described as Fog (Fear of Google) and Dog (Disdain of Google), is beginning to set in.

Not least of critics’ concerns was that mysterious investment in Mrs Brin’s genetics firm, which Google proved curiously reluctant to explain. Was this just a corporate wedding present, as some bloggers wondered? Or is Google plotting some sinister link between computers and the human brain?

Several commentators recalled a remark that Brin had made years ago. “Why not improve your brain?” he had mused. “Perhaps in the future we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

The notion that Google is somehow planning to plug us all into a mainframe computer – as imagined in The Matrix – might have been left to internet fantasy had Eric Schmidt, the group’s chief executive, not popped up in London last week with some extravagant remarks about its ambitions.

Schmidt declared that the company’s goal over the next five years was to collect as much personal data as it can on individual computer users in a bid to improve the quality of its search results.

“We are very early in the total information we have within Google,” Schmidt boasted. “[At the moment] we cannot even answer the most basic questions about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as what shall I do tomorrow and what job shall I take.”

Schmidt’s words sparked another furore. “At what stage did the company whose motto is ‘don’t be evil’ evolve into the information society’s most determined Big Brother,” wondered one critic.

It is a debate which goes not only to the heart of the Google phenomenon but also to heart of the digital age. From the start, Google’s mission – something it takes incredibly seriously – has been to organise the world’s information to make it “universally accessible and useful”.

Until now this has been regarded by most not just as a worthy project but also as an entirely benign one. But what if, as Google seems to be saying, the mission is only truly realisable if Google must know everything there is to know about us first. Is that too high a price to pay for access to the fruits of knowledge?

Put another way, is Google giving us too much of a good thing?

UNTIL now criticism of Google has come not from ordinary users – an incredible 81.9m people use its systems each month – but from its competitors.

On August 16, 2004, the firm was floated in New York with shares valued at $85 each. Those shares now sell for $460 and Google is worth more than Disney and McDonald’s combined. That growth alone is enough to put noses out of joint and parallels have been drawn with Microsoft, the Seattle-based behemoth built by Bill Gates which is often accused of monopolist behaviour.

Google is no Microsoft – at least not yet. Its real crime so far as capitalism is concerned has been to redraw the business landscape. Worse, perhaps, Google’s founders seem not to be motivated by profit but by an altruistic desire to reorganise the world. Day after day they continue to give away valuable business properties. Free word processing software, e-mail, maps . . . the list just grows.

For businesses forged in the “greed is good” philosophy, this ethos is troubling. “Who’s afraid of Google?” asked Wired magazine. The answer: “Everyone.”

Everyone that is except for the vast majority of its users. For above the din of corporate whiners can be heard the distinctive sound of millions of internet buddies clicking on Google searches.

“I don’t think most internet users worry much about Google,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the website Search Engine Land. “People use it and it does the job.”

ALTHOUGH it is free and no one forces us to use Google, the privacy issue is starting to build. Last week the European commission – long a thorn in Microsoft’s side – turned its focus on Google and demanded that it justify its policy of retaining data on internet addresses and invidu-als’ search habits for up to two years.

Small businesses – of which Google has helped tens of thousands to flourish – are also starting to complain. Just ask Sebastien St-Laurent, who runs Paradoxal-Press, the online bookshop.

St-Laurent signed up for Google checkout, a free web payment system. When he sold a volume called The Big Book of Porn he received an e-mail from Google warning that he was violating its ban on pornographic sales.

The fact The Big Book of Porn is a serious study of the X-rated film industry had eluded Google’s automated censors. “Their policy doesn’t prohibit the sale of these products, just that you are not allowed to let users use Google checkout,” St-Laurent said.

Then there was the row over China and Google’s agreement to build a search engine that excluded certain results that Beijing wanted to censor. How could this be reconciled with Google’s “don’t be evil” pledge, western bloggers wanted to know.

Even before Shmidt’s comments, privacy groups were complaining that Google’s computer repositories store the kind of personal detail that would have made the East German Stasi secret police drool – not just what we seach for at our computers but who we are in contact with, what we are writing about, what secrets we may be keeping.

Why should we be worried about this? Many users fear their visits to X-rated sites might be made public, for example. In North Carolina, a man was convicted of murdering his wife after a review of his computer revealed Google searches for such words as “neck”, “snap” and “break” in the days before she died.

One Google executive recently revealed that it receives several subpoenas a month seeking data about individual computer use. The company’s policy is to inform the affected user and comply with any legal order.

“Google is making itself a honey-pot for law enforcement and hacking,” said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. The company has responded by agreeing to reduce the period it keeps personal data to two years.

For critics such as Todd Cochrane, of the Geek News Central website, this is not enough. Google is buying FeedBurner, a company that tracks computer users who subscribe to all kinds of online content providers. “Have people really thought about the ramifications of this?” Cochrane asked last week.

“Google will not only know what you search for, what ads you click on, but they will also know exactly what you are subscribed to at a very intimate level . . . they are going to know more about some people than their own family members may.”

The challenge for Google is obvious. Its executives are bursting with enthusiasm for more data to deliver the facts that each one of us personally requires. But at the same time it must remain a trusted friend.

“This whole personalisation thing is in its infancy,” said Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice-president of engineering and research. “The more information you have about the user the better.”

The question is: the better for whom?

All on Google, and all free

Documents

If you don’t want to buy a word processing or spreadsheet package then use Google “Docs & Spreadsheets”. Not only can you create and edit secure files for nothing but they will also be saved in perpetuity for you on the worldwide web, freeing up valuable disk space and making them accessible from anywhere in the world. You can also allow others to edit or just view those documents.

E-mail

Hotmail pioneered free e-mail but Google’s free “Gmail” service comes with unlimited storage space, so you will never have to delete a message again no matter how many pictures or documents are attached.

Photos

Edit, sort, store and share your pictures with Google’s Picasa service. It’s free and again storage is unlimited.

Maps

A world atlas, UK road map and A-Z used to be a necessary purchase for any home or office. Not now. Google Earth and Google Maps will get you anywhere you want to go for nothing. Better still, you can zoom in and see your destination before you set off and you can also compute the distance and likely travelling time. Just type in an address or postcode.

Web publishing

Create your own website or webblog for nothing with Google’s Page Creator and Blogger services. If you want to make money from your work, click a button and adverts will appear.

Business

If you want to drive customers to your business use Google “ad words”. An account costs nothing to set up and the adverts you write can be made to appear on the websites or searches you choose anywhere in the world. You pay only when someone clicks on your ad and goes through to your business. Even then you can control how much you pay.

Computer security

This is one area that Google has yet to get under control. But fret not. Free software that protects your computer from spam and viruses is available from various sources on the web. One of the most powerful programs is called Avast! Like its paid-for rivals, it can detect and destroy viruses and automatically updates to protect against new threats as they arise.

Is Google good or bad for consumers? Go to www.timesonline.co.uk/consumercentral