Was Google’s Disastrous January A Passing Storm Or Sign Of Things To Come?

It’s a little stunning to contemplate how wrong things have gone for Google in just the first month of 2012, as the company hopes to put a disastrous January in the rear-view mirror with perhaps another tear-jerking Super Bowl ad this Sunday.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin haven’t turned into Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis or anything, but Google just endured the worst month in the company’s history and nothing will get easier as rivals and the government take aim at what used to be such a delightful fuzzy little tech success story. Google’s unlikely to have a month like that again, this year anyway. But it’s kind of shocking to contemplate just how uneasy the company has made a lot of people by its decisions around social search and privacy. Perhaps more troubling, its responses to those big questions have been tone-deaf and almost defiant, traits one did not associate with Google until recently.