Google accused of meddling with S Korean probe

Surprised that they would do what they can to hamper an investigation, destroy evidence, ... not really. A bit surprised that they might have got caught doing it ... yes. (Would be rather suprised if the officials can make the allegations stick though, unless they just sacrifice a pawn.).

Does it really matter?

I'm for the free market as much as the next person, but at the end of the day I've never found a search engine that works anywhere near as well as Google. If there was a viable alternative to Google search then there should be a way to use it, but Google gets by far the best results, so what's the problem?

I do not see how people choosing to or even Google telling people to work from home would be perceive hampering a investigation, I am always getting told to work from home by my employer, surely in a country has wired up as South Korea has a lot of people working from home and it more like to be the investigators laziness that cause this problem and not Google, it is a lot more convenient to investigate a company if every employee is in the office.

As to deleting of documents, some how I find this highly unlikely and it will be interesting to see if that allegation is true or it is a mistake by the investigators.

Also just to add why would google even store files on individual computers, surely for a company the encourage other companies to store all there files in the cloud Google themselves would be doing the exact same thing, if not to an even greater extent than its customers.

Small fry compared to the manipulation of their own index

This is small fry compared to the manipulation of their own search index. The regularity with which inconvenient political truths are 'forgotten' by Google's index evidences a direct, political manipulation of the internet which should concern us all. Would I trust Google? Not a chance.