I don’t want to come across as blindly Googletropic. Google has its wrinkles and warts. But I do admire the way they figure out their mistakes quickly and fix them.

Case in point: The Chrome Terms of Service. Google’s new browser had some pretty onerous terms, namely, that all your data are belong to them. Okay, more specifically, anything you put into the Internets is something they may re-use later.

This makes sense for Google’s mission of indexing the world — today, they only see what they crawl, and what you do on their sites; but much of the Internet happens behind SSL encryption, or in places robots.txt can’t follow. To better advertise to you, they need to know what you’re doing beyond their Googly Appendages.

But Google quickly realized it had overreached, in the same way Facebook did with Beacon. And what I like about Google is that they often correct themselves quickly and completely. They did it when 37Signals compared Appengine demo Huddlechat to its Campfire product. And now, they’ve agreed the TOS is onerous and that they’ll change it, too. Folks like Matt Cutts are a breath of candid fresh air at times when some companies treat online activity like a land grab.

Google’s accelerator technology was another attempt to capture the knowledge of users surfing. By using the accelerator, you surfed through Google, effectively “pulling” the Internet through Google. This not only gave them visibility into your activities, but also helped to crawl the far reaches of the web where spiders can’t get. But it was plagued by problems, most notably pre-fetching of HTTP GETs that broke many applications.

Google wants to know what you’re doing. It’s core to their business. And having that much information on your activities (Chrome’s porn mode aside) is probably a dangerous thing anywhere. But they do seem to realize, more quickly than other companies of their size, when they’ve overstepped their bounds.