Google ramps up the Evil

12 responses to “Google ramps up the Evil”

1. 

   heet_myser

   Dec 16, 2008 at 8:03 pm

   How will we ever be able to trust anyone again?

   Reply
2. 

   Happy Tinfoil Cat

   Dec 16, 2008 at 8:31 pm

   Thanks fro the info.

   Reply
3. 

   WebSeitz

   Dec 16, 2008 at 11:29 pm

   Actually the characters in DiamondAge were noting how vapid a moral stance that is.

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4. 

   caitlinburke

   Dec 17, 2008 at 3:46 am

   Google doesn’t have to define evil. All they have to say is, "Come on, our heart’s in the right place!" It takes a lot to be evil. Don’t be evil is just a cop-out compared with Don’t do abusive things.

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5. 

   perpetual lake

   Dec 17, 2008 at 7:56 pm

   Sure, Google’s expanding domination is worrying. But so far, they’ve been competing by being technologically superior and not by using questionable business ethics as microsoft has been doing.

   Having been a happy user of Firefox for years, I recently started using chrome and It just performs so much better. It lacks a few notable features still (plug in capability being one), but the functionality that’s there is very well designed. I very much doubt that Firefox will lose a lot of users because of Google’s marketing. They will lose users because of technological inferiority.

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6. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 18, 2008 at 12:04 am

   I don’t think anyone thinks they are like Microsoft, yet. It’s just a disturbing possibility as the organization scales in scope and platform power.

   WebSeitz: yes… The requirement for internal consistency seems pretty minimalist… and probably underlies the universal disdain for moralizing hypocrites (e.g., Spitzer).

   So, on a lighter note, just yesterday, I was pointed to http://www.god.org and the first sponsored listing: "Compare Prices And Find all about God At Low Prices – shopping.yahoo.com"

   Presumably this is Yahoo being evil.

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7. 

   heet_myser

   Dec 18, 2008 at 1:43 am

   It reminds me of my favorite bit of graffiti from here in town, spotted writ large on the exterior wall of one of the fancy boutiques downtown. Below another artist’s "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal," some trickster came along and scribbled, "With any purchase." I’ve always loved it so.

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8. 

   angry shock

   Dec 20, 2008 at 5:22 am

   All revolutionaries become conservatives once in office. It’s the cycle of life.

   You know i’ve been a fan of google. After 2005 all changed for me, and up to date, i hold no particular feeling of attachment for what they do anymore.

   I used to like the humble team who invented and ran a search engine and an great internet advertising business model, not this kinda of pinky-and-the-brain spawned formation who is trying to take over the world every night ever since (and whose search engine has become trashy in direct proportion to their expansion in other territories).

   Sorry for the rant.

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9. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 20, 2008 at 5:01 pm

   very interesting…. I remember you as one of Google’s biggest fans… Now a bellwether

   Google slips from list of top companies on privacy:
   "Google (and Microsoft) suffer from big company syndrome… Also of note, Facebook moved into the top 20 for the first time"

   Dvorak: Why Google must die, CNET: fixed results

   Reply
10. 

    angry shock

    Dec 21, 2008 at 3:10 am

    i personally don’t care much on the privacy issue… i mean, i work with lots of private data from my clients and don’t ever mess up with it or read their mail or whatever you might think as even "innocent fun".

    so i can believe in privacy statements of others. Actually Facebook with their brilliant surveillance tool they invented and all other hooked to, to help people look indiscriminately to their contacts movements… seems to me a lot more invasive and unrespectful. There’s also a main difference between handling data and making intelligence on it.

    However see how people come to love this facebook surveillance tool… like the cellphones… now you are a heretic if you don’t have one, and if you do but don’t answer or turn it off, people think they have the right to demand an explanation for your "not availability"!

    What bothers me about google behaviour is… several things!!! …but in a nutshell this about trying to do everything and acquiring everything like a big fish and then go give it for free, messing up with people who work and make a living, reasonably, giving the same services. That’s one thing.

    And that they set standards which are not clear to me. I don’t think they are as a company a case of success, because they are not a model of anything… they just have plenty of money available to put on million places and you know… if you play Roulette almost alone and you put a bet in every number…

    it will turn out that you will surely win.

    That’s not a success model to me.

    But what most bothers me is the evolution of their core asset, the search engine. It sucks. And they are mainly responsible for this with this brilliant (in an ideal world in which people is all honest) advertising model Adsense-Adwords. Giving the chance to people to make easy money with adsense turned everything upside down in website creation and conception. There are more websites now made as an excuse in order to be filled with adsense to make money from it, than real websites made for their intrinsic mission.

    This sucks. And as with pornography and pedophilia and all that… it’s not the offer itself to be blamed… it’s first the perverts who consume that.

    If there wasn’t an Adsense program that rewards people indiscriminately for making websites with boxes where to place ads (google charge for to customesrs of adwords), there wouldn’t be so much crap in search results.

    Who’s to blame, then? the rewardees or the rewarders?

    speaking of which, I have 3 VERY interesting readings…

    1) about this "who’s to blame the pig or who feeds it?" (in regard to global crisis)
    blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=1576&tag=content;col1
    "There’s an old saying in investigative reporting—follow the money. Turns out that’s a pretty good clue to understanding lots about organizations and the troubles they encounter. While pundits expound endlessly on how the current financial mess arose, the answers are, in virtually every case, quite simple. People did what they were paid to do—make (bad) loans, take excessive risks, package and resell worthless paper, leverage up the balance sheet, and so forth. Unless we get better at the seemingly simple task of predicting what reward systems are actually going to do, and unless we get smarter about designing rewards that don’t produce destructive behavior, the current bad news will just get recycled in the future."

    2) this one written by Dany Sullivan, a search engine expert from the old days… ranting about all this online mess google is partly responsible for
    searchengineland.com/crappy-mp3-sites-comment-spamming-en…
    "Stellar content. I’m so glad this exists on the web, helping all of us out there. [irony here on the trash content quoted right above in his article]

    Well, it’s making someone some money. And it’s doing so because that site is loaded with ads from Google. The irony, eh? Because it’s difficult to cry out against crap like this in terms of it polluting search results when Google itself is funding plenty of it.

    And so all the rationalizations begin. Hey, I’m going to go after crappy directory links because screw it, they work. I’m not going to bother with focusing on content because I see plenty of crappy content doing well, so good content is bullshit. I’m going to keep cloaking or doing whatever I want because clearly Google doesn’t enforce its rules in an even-handed manner. I’m going to A, B, C because of X, Y, Z."

    3) And this about the dangers of Free
    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_danger_of_free.php
    "The point is that Google can afford to give away everything for free because of its success with search. This is being done openly now and it is just plain wrong. It is a dangerous poker game, where Google can raise stakes because it has a huge pile of cash. What happened to fair competition and not being evil? This is an evil way to break into the market. Of course, we all prefer the light Google Docs to Microsoft’s heavy desktop software. This is not the point. The issue is that this kind of free is absurd. If Google wanted to break into eCommerce, it could afford to put Amazon out of the book business by giving away free books. How would we react to that?"

    Reply
11. 

    angry shock

    Dec 21, 2008 at 3:11 am

    jeez, i didn’t realize it became such a long post while writing!!!

    Reply
12. 

    angry shock

    Apr 11, 2010 at 12:21 am

    wow I came back here for Neal Diamond’s quote on hypocrisy and re-read my last post. Hey, that was interesting. And interesting I so much still agree on what I said…

    Reply