Comments on: Google’s gone evil.

By: PreobrajenskySuka1

PreobrajenskySuka1 — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:41:24 +0000

Hallo, but colleague, you are sure?
prof.Preobrajensky.
Good luck!

By: Shock - Companies give themselves preferential treatment « Cynically Speaking

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:05:10 +0000

[...] Don MacAskill thought it was against Google’s code of conduct to leverage their hugely successful search engine to promote their less successful software. [...]

By: Let’s spank G**gle!

Let’s spank G**gle! — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:04:16 +0000

[...] So G**gle’s gone evil. Read this or this. It’s clear that they became behemoth which stopped treating their users customers with respect. And don’t even get me started on their deal with China and self censoring in order to broaden their ad audience. This made me start to think: how users can express their disgust? Maybe you can switch to some other search engine? That’s a great move but you’re still will be exposed to their money-making-machine – AdSense. It became so widespread that you don’t even know what an ad is and what the non-ad content is these days. Fortunately there’s a super easy way to disable AdSense on your machine once for all – no more stinky ‘Sponsored links’ sections polluting web pages! Just grab and run gKiller and it will G**gle-proof your machine. May the force be with you! [...]

By: theLaggard » Linkfest 1/2/07

theLaggard » Linkfest 1/2/07 — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:10:43 +0000

[...] The blogosphere has been consistently discussing Google and their diminishing trust. This entry shows how Google is pushing their inferior calendar and blog products. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. This is simple marketing and using leverage to gain more users, but a majority of the tech world believe this has hurt their trust in Google. [...]

By: Douglas Clifton

Douglas Clifton — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 02:33:10 +0000

The funniest of your examples is searching Google for “blog.” The top 4 results are:

1. Wikipedia - blog
2. Google Blog Search
3. Blogger
4. Official Google Blog

By: CenterNetworks

CenterNetworks — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:22:28 +0000

What’s up at Google?

At the beginning of November, I attended ad:tech in NYC and during my trip I was really disappointed by Google. Andreas wrote a post about how often we use Google’s services in a day. Earlier this week, we had the Gmail fiasco which I believe should b…

By: onethumb

onethumb — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:32:48 +0000

@John Barron:

In general, I agree. And I’m willing to concede that this may very well be the case (though the attitude of your typical Googler doesn’t indicate this is a motivation).

But I can tell you from first-hand experience that here, at SmugMug, customer satisfaction is a much much higher priority than maximizing shareholder profits.

The really great side benefit is that by maximizing customer satisfaction we’re actually maximizing shareholder profits. The two can and do go hand-in-hand sometimes. Probably they should far more often than they do.

Imagine a world where one of the cell phone companies suddenly started treating their customers like people, with courtesy and respect. Since number portability is here today, there’s very little lock-in. This mythical cell company that cares about customer satisfcation would likely have a stampede of business, and as a result, a mountain of shareholder profits.

It could be done. And I think we’ve all been hoping (and I still hope) that Google is that sort of company.

By: John Barron

John Barron — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:26:55 +0000

It cracks me up that people believe mission statements and corporate value declarations. The number one goal of any business is to maximize share holder profit period. Any BS statement like “don’t be evil” is only declared to build good will, -it does not influence how they act. That is why all the dumbass computer geeks who keep supporting google, like it is some kind of leader of the people, are complete morrons. I think any loyalty to a for profit corporation is completely nuts. Microsoft, google, -they are all the same and yes, no duh, they are goint to do whatever makes their shareholders the most money, not what makes customers happy. Customer satisfaction is only one of many tactics to maximising shareholder profit.

By: Ryan Massie

Ryan Massie — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:07:11 +0000

I really don’t see how this is any different than manufacturers putting coupons on product packaging for their other products. Evil only if you are trying to pass it off as something as it’s not, like a search result. In this case it looks nothing like the rest of the search results. I see no evil here.

In Blake Ross’ case, when you download Firefox, there’s a little blurb on the page encouraging you to buy stuff from the Mozilla store. Mozilla would be guilty in kind. But again, I don’t see the evil here.

I’ve always interpreted Google’s “not being evil” mantra being more about protecting your privacy, not being ridiculous with their intellectual property, and trying to solve the world’s information problems.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:36:29 +0000

A tip is not a search result, I know that when I see it, it’s formatted completely differently. These tips look even less like real search results than do sponsored links.

Evil? Hyperbole is what’s really evil.