It's arguable that the worst thing Google has done is be the ultimate fruition of the ad model.
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
chetanvaity · 2h ago
When we used to talk about the data-collection for various reasons - but primarily for ad-targetting and later personlization purposes, we always were quite concerned.
The data-collection felt very wrong. But, we kinda collectively sighed and allowed it, thinking ads are a necessary evil.
First of all, as engineers, this is a cop-out.
Even if we grant ads as a necessary evil, this should always have been stop-gap to a better - a less evil - business model.
As engineers, we again failed to stand up against this <i>continued</i> use - for decades now.
But,
nobody ever agreed for the data to be made available to the State.
This is a breach of trust!
If anyone says their hands were tied - I say they were tied with money.
Workaccount2 · 1h ago
That's the thing though, there is no better business model.
We have subscriptions, ads, and donations. 30 years into the internet, with the brightest minds of humanity trying to figure this out, no one has the better business model.
The cop out is saying "there has to be a better way."
What we really need is a reconciliation and recalibration of what it means to pay for something and why it needs to be done.
dismalaf · 1h ago
> made available to the State.
Guess what? Apple, Microsoft, your credit card company, phone company, etc... all comply with government warrants.
At least Google stands up to dictatorships like Russia and China, unlike the others who still do business with them.
terribleperson · 1h ago
I've been thinking lately that the proliferation of ad-supported services, as well as venture capital supported services (free while they look for a way to monetize) is an overall bad thing.
If big companies are giving stuff away for free for 5 years, or a decade, or more, it's hard for any business to develop selling that stuff. It's hard to even justify the idea of selling that stuff, or similar stuff, when someone else is giving it away for free. It's unlikely that any charity will develop, giving these things away for free, because no one recognizes that is even charity. It prevents governments from recognizing that there are niches for fundamental services that have developed that could reasonably be provided by the government or by a regulated utility.
I don't know what to do about companies giving things away for free and people and even society becoming dependent on it. It doesn't seem like it's going to stop on it's own.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
If you think it's bad now, imagine five years from now when people have lost the skill to do their job from scratch or read something longer than a bullet point. A lot of people will have no choice but to pay whatever price AI costs.
According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case.
(Added:)
Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
PaulHoule · 2h ago
I was involved with a group of SEO enthusiasts around 2010 or so, even then most of them were moving away from SEO towards buying ads on Google which is what Google wanted them to do.
The most remarkable difference was that you can make incremental A/B styles on an Adsense campaign but you can't do that with SEO not least because Google has patented methods to cause your rankings to go haywire whenever you change anything about your site -- one reason why sites like Reddit can go a decade without a major design refresh, if you've got a site which does well you want to keep growing it but whatever you do don't change the link structure.
SEO is a matter of investing in content and link building to get traffic, since Google is in the business of selling traffic, they don't want you to invest in anything other than Adsense. It's like how Facebook doesn't give commercial entities a lot of visibility unless the pay up. I remember when Zynga games got huge with games that would spam you about everything your friends were doing so you'd want to play and back then Zynga was making big $$ and Facebook nothing but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg but a stop to that.
mmmpetrichor · 3h ago
yeah it's like hes complaining about them being evil better then he is able to. lol.
bediger4000 · 2h ago
The author is William Dembski, a proponent of Intelligent Design. You shouldn't be surprised by this particular complaint.
sweeter · 3h ago
Idk how someone wouldn't mention the way they exercise monopoly power or data collection etc...
mmmpetrichor · 3h ago
so OP does SEO and also complains about google being evil. I have no sympathy for someone doing SEO to basically ruin the "organic" results and then complain about how google controls the results. So what, you want to control the result for profit instead of them?
PaulHoule · 2h ago
SEO has multiple faces. The average real estate agent would come to an SEO and wish they could sprinkle some pixie dust on a site for sore eyes and get people to come. A good SEO will say, "Look, write a good blog about things going on in your town and you'll become the #1 real estate agent in your town" and they'll say "I can't do that", and the SEO will say "You make enough in one commission to hire somebody part time to write it for a year."
The big story of the last five years is that Google has decided to let certain entities win permanently in certain areas. There used to be a lot of competition in review sites, some were good, some where bad, now Forbes dominates reviews in almost everything and they're atrocious
On one level SEO can just be a matter of search engine compatibility. So many sites are built without any thought about how they'll interact with web crawlers.
mwkaufma · 2h ago
Come for the lazy AI-generated banner image, stay for the buried-in-the-middle defense of "alternative medicine."
derektank · 2h ago
>In 2015 Google’s parent company Alphabet retired the old motto, now substituting for it “Do the right thing.” The old motto was better. Negation has advantages that positive assertions lack.
Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
SEOCurmudgeon · 2h ago
I couldn't read the article because the author is too lazy to fact check himself.
The article perpetuates the myth that Google retired the Don't Be Evil motto. Untrue. It was previously mentioned twice, now it's mentioned only once. The original click bait article was mistaken and people continue to fail to read Google's mission statement.
Lammy · 2h ago
> Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
quesera · 32m ago
That Quartz article needs an editor who knows more about the 1990s, Silicon Valley, Stanford, DARPA, NSF, and how grants work.
I say this with full knowledge (courtesy of Wikipedia) that the author is a former Director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the National Science Foundation.
jonahrd · 2h ago
I found it incredibly confusing to read the following:
> Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.
I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.
The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.
They don't share how they do their judgement, and it's strange how Norway ranks #1 despite having laws that allow for imprisonment for hate speech.[1] Perhaps hate speech doesn't count as speech in the ranking?
There are two rankings at your link, the freedom of speech index and the press freedom index. If you look at the freedom of speech index the USA is among the top 5 countries for freedom of speech protections behind only Norway and Denmark
lern_too_spel · 2h ago
The guy complains about how Google down ranks an anti-vaccine doctor. His idea of free speech is giving cranks like himself a platform above useful content.
readthenotes1 · 2h ago
"Lord Acton’s admonition about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely has, in the years since its new motto, been borne out at Google. "
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
The data-collection felt very wrong. But, we kinda collectively sighed and allowed it, thinking ads are a necessary evil.
First of all, as engineers, this is a cop-out.
Even if we grant ads as a necessary evil, this should always have been stop-gap to a better - a less evil - business model.
As engineers, we again failed to stand up against this <i>continued</i> use - for decades now.
But,
nobody ever agreed for the data to be made available to the State.
This is a breach of trust!
If anyone says their hands were tied - I say they were tied with money.
We have subscriptions, ads, and donations. 30 years into the internet, with the brightest minds of humanity trying to figure this out, no one has the better business model.
The cop out is saying "there has to be a better way."
What we really need is a reconciliation and recalibration of what it means to pay for something and why it needs to be done.
Guess what? Apple, Microsoft, your credit card company, phone company, etc... all comply with government warrants.
At least Google stands up to dictatorships like Russia and China, unlike the others who still do business with them.
If big companies are giving stuff away for free for 5 years, or a decade, or more, it's hard for any business to develop selling that stuff. It's hard to even justify the idea of selling that stuff, or similar stuff, when someone else is giving it away for free. It's unlikely that any charity will develop, giving these things away for free, because no one recognizes that is even charity. It prevents governments from recognizing that there are niches for fundamental services that have developed that could reasonably be provided by the government or by a regulated utility.
I don't know what to do about companies giving things away for free and people and even society becoming dependent on it. It doesn't seem like it's going to stop on it's own.
(Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
The most remarkable difference was that you can make incremental A/B styles on an Adsense campaign but you can't do that with SEO not least because Google has patented methods to cause your rankings to go haywire whenever you change anything about your site -- one reason why sites like Reddit can go a decade without a major design refresh, if you've got a site which does well you want to keep growing it but whatever you do don't change the link structure.
SEO is a matter of investing in content and link building to get traffic, since Google is in the business of selling traffic, they don't want you to invest in anything other than Adsense. It's like how Facebook doesn't give commercial entities a lot of visibility unless the pay up. I remember when Zynga games got huge with games that would spam you about everything your friends were doing so you'd want to play and back then Zynga was making big $$ and Facebook nothing but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg but a stop to that.
The big story of the last five years is that Google has decided to let certain entities win permanently in certain areas. There used to be a lot of competition in review sites, some were good, some where bad, now Forbes dominates reviews in almost everything and they're atrocious
https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/
On one level SEO can just be a matter of search engine compatibility. So many sites are built without any thought about how they'll interact with web crawlers.
Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
The article perpetuates the myth that Google retired the Don't Be Evil motto. Untrue. It was previously mentioned twice, now it's mentioned only once. The original click bait article was mistaken and people continue to fail to read Google's mission statement.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
It's interesting how the founding mythos gets compressed by time to omit key details: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
I say this with full knowledge (courtesy of Wikipedia) that the author is a former Director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the National Science Foundation.
> Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.
I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.
The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
[1]https://www.litteraturhuset.no/en/freedom-of-expression
Acton was wrong.
Robert Caro: Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.