A recent Google acquisition of DoubleClick for a whopping USD 3.1 billion has turned many heads. The recent past certainly does not fit into Google’s traditional non-aggressive attitude towards acquisitions for monopoly in the market. DoubleClick Inc., a spearhead in ad-serving, is only one of many companies acquired by Google. A comprehensive list can be seen here. Beside Google’s acquisitions, this article will also explore some changes in Google’s philosophy and potential threats to web community.The Google Philosophy – When Founded
Apart from some often repeated corporate cliches, the main philosophies that used to make Google a non-corporate organisation are given as:
You Can Make Money Without Doing Evil
The very hyped statement by the founders, that made Google look so good, and Microsoft well, not so good, has been Google’s key work philosophy. Google capatalized on Microsoft’s negative corporate image in the end user mindset by this statement and acting accordingly, at least for a couple of years.
You Can Be Serious Without a Suit.
The statement which reflects Google work culture. Flexlible working hours, pets allowed in the workplace, twenty percent of working time for a project of your own are the few of many attractions one gets while working for Google. This made Google the best place to work for.
No Pop Up Ads
The plain and simple interface with just the text relevant ads, without any pop-ups or graphics-intensive ads, won the hearts of users throughout the world.
Actually Google put so much focus on publicising as being ‘good’, that it became a synonym of goodness.
Google Criticism and Controversies
Google’s every action at every point in time has been highly critiqued. Here are a few controversies that occured in the recent past.
Google Book Search
Google book search is Google’s very ambitious project to digitize all the information available in text with the help of five university libraries. There has been a lot of chaos from very start over this issue, as people feared the potential infringement of copyright issues by Google.
Other Copyright Issues
A number of organizations have used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [.pdf] to demand that Google remove references to allegedly copyrighted material on other sites. Google typically handles this by removing the link as requested and including a link to the complaint in the search results.
There have also been complaints that Google’s Web cache feature violates copyright. However, Google provides mechanisms for requesting that caching be disabled. Google also honors the robots.txt file, which is another mechanism that allows operators of a website to request that part or all of their site not be included in search engine results. The U.S. District Court of Nevada ruled that Google’s caches do not constitute copyright infringement under American law in Field vs. Google [.pdf] and Parker vs. Google [.pdf].
Agence France Presse and Other Disputes
In March 2005, Agence France-Presse (AFP) sued Google for USD 17.5 million, alleging that Google News infringed on its copyright because, “Google includes AFP’s photos, stories and news headlines on Google News without permission from Agence France-Presse”. It was also alleged that Google ignored a cease and desist order, though Google counters that it has opt-out procedures which AFP could have followed but did not.
According to the Canada Free Press, “Google Inc. is now attempting to remove all postings of Agence France-Presse material from its site, although AFP spokesmen say that even if this is done, the lawsuit will continue. It seems that the basis of the lawsuit is just the abstract notion of copyright without any real damages to justify the action.” The article concluded, “It would be a sad day for those who look to the Internet for news if AFP is successful in limiting what Google can display. AFP’s lawsuit, if successful, is bound to have a major impact on how news is delivered on the Internet.”
On February 21, 2006, in a similar lawsuit involving adult online site Perfect 10 [sexually explicit, see disclaimer], a U.S. District Court Judge ruled that Google’s image search function had violated the law by copying, without permission, photographs created by Perfect 10.
Google China Dispute
Controversy has occurred over Google’s decision to adhere to the Internet censorship policy in mainland China, colloquially known as “The Great Firewall of China”. Google.cn search results are filtered so as not to bring up any results concerning the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, sites supporting the independence movements of Tibet and Taiwan or the Falun Gong movement, and other information perceived to be harmful to the People’s Republic of China. This is interpreted by some activists as against the “Don’t Be Evil” corporate philosophy of Google.
Google News Controversy
In early 2006 Google removed several news sites from its news search engine because complaints were received about various articles that were critical of Islam. These included The New Media Journal. Other sites removed included MichNews and The Jawa Report.
These sites remain accessible from Google’s main search page as normal, but are no longer included in Google News. Google responded by stating that “We do not allow articles and sources expressly promoting hate speech viewpoints in Google News, although referencing hate speech for commentary and analysis is acceptable”.
Page Rank System
Google’s central PageRank system has been criticized. Some call it “undemocratic”. Common arguments are that the system is unfairly biased towards large web sites, and that the criteria for a page’s importance are not subject to peer review. PageRank is a largely automated system which is impartial in so far as it knows no personal bias. However, Google’s system also relies on a certain degree of human oversight, and use of company names on Adwords. Furthermore, the deletion of critical sites from Google results (for example, sites critical of Scientology) is decided by individual human beings according to company policy. It remains unclear whether any process could assert the importance of a page in a way that would draw less criticism than the current PageRank system.The system is also susceptible to manipulation and fraud through the use of dummy sites.
Gmail – No Deletion Policy
Google’s Gmail privacy policy points out that your email will be retained even after you close your account: “The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.”
This stired a wave of anxiety among Gmail users, and suggested some potential evil use of the information by Google. However, Google maintained that no individual shall be reading the e-mail and a crawler is used to generate relevant text based ads as per the content of the e-mail.
The YouTube Controversy
Youtube.com, a subsidary of Google Inc. and a major video sharing website, has been the centre of controversies since its inception. Youtube has been banned in more than five countries, mainly due to copyright infringement allegations. On April 16, 2007, Google’s CEO Eric E. Schmidt presented a keynote speech at the NAB Convention in Las Vegas. During the Q&A, Schmidt announced that YouTube was close to enacting a content filtering system to remove infringing content from the service. The new system, called “Claim Your Content,” will automatically identify copyrighted material so that it can be removed.
Once again Youtube is under controversies, by claiming the user content in their new Terms and Conditions.
“By submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business in any media formats and through any media channels.”
DoubleClick Controversy
Google’s association with controversial companies, continued with the recently proposed acquisation of DoubleClick. DoubleClick has been accused of gathering user information without their prior knowledge, acknowledgement or agreement. DoubleClick’s modus operandi includes setting up a cookie which is set to track the user visits to different websites and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing.
Google-Turning Evil?
Google was established by two stanford Phd’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page with a clear mission in their minds: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet. A plain, simple search engine that was both powerful and intuitive. More sophisticated techies and press came to appreciate Google’s computational elegance and algorithmically achieved efficiency. Within months, Google became one of the most popular sites on the Web – and not long after that, “Google” became a verb. Today, Internet users spend about 15 million hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.
From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil” and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In September, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.
So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing; it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst (Google is not known to delete any data they have ever collected ) for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and perhaps most worrisome of all, a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.
Every search engine gathers information about its users, primarily by sending us cookies or text files that track our online movements. Most cookies expire within a few months or years. Google’s, though, don’t expire until 2038. Until then, when you use the company’s search engine or visit any of the myriad of affiliated sites, it will record what you search for and when, which links you click on, which ads you access. Google’s cookies can’t identify you by name, but they log your computer’s IP address; by way of metaphor, Google doesn’t have your driver’s license number, but it knows the license plate number of the car you are driving.
And Google knows far more than that. If you are a Gmail user, Google stashes copies of every email you send and receive. If you use any of its other products, Google Maps, Froogle, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Scholar, Talk, Images, Video, and News, it will keep track of which directions you seek, which products you shop for, which phrases you research in a book, which satellite photos and news stories you view, and on and on. Served up a la carte, this is probably no big deal. Many websites stow snippets of your data. The problem is that there’s nothing to prevent Google from combining all of this information to create detailed dossiers on its customers, something the company admits is possible in principle. Soon Google may even be able to keep track of users in the real world: Its latest move is into free wifi, which will require it to know your whereabouts (i.e., which router you are closest to).
Google insists that it uses individual data only to provide targeted advertising. But history shows that information seldom remains limited to the purpose for which it was collected. Accordingly, some privacy advocates suggest that Google and other search companies should stop hoarding user queries altogether, but we can only hope that Google does not use its collected information for unethical corporate benefits, as their is nothing more dangerous than a gaint with power and will to do the evil.
Disclaimer:
“http://www.perfect10.com” may contain sexually explicit material, which may be illegal in some countries and/or offensive to some individuals. The reader is advised to view the source website only if the local law and regulations permit it.
About the author:
Mohit has recently completed his bachelors degree from VIT, Vellore. He is passionate about blogging and is widely known as a freelancer. Recently an admission in an high iq society www.highiqsociety.org has made him interested in becoming a mensa.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSAlert.
Don’t be evil? isn’t it a bit too late for that? They already crossed the line in my book.
“Don’t be evil? isn’t it a bit too late for that? They already crossed the line in my book.”
HOW?
Well the article does actually go into this, I don’t know if you read it?
They scan the emails of their gmail users, and they keep your search history. That makes them evil in my book. In fact, I’d like to find another search engine if someone could recommend a good one?
if you don’t want use googles evil engine you can always use http://www.live.com
However evil Google is (or isn’t), It is better to have the diversity/competition of 2 evil companies, rather than just Microsoft(owns live.com) being one arch-evil company.
“hey scan the emails of their gmail users, and they keep your search history. That makes them evil in my book. In fact, I’d like to find another search engine if someone could recommend a good one?”
Hey dude…. Sweaty Steve Balmar the MS Highschool Football coach say MSNs search engine is better… go use their’s and dont let the door hit you and the arse!
When the American government came knocking for user’s data – both Yahoo and Microsoft handed it over without batting an eyelid. Google refused, and took it to court.
exact. Saving al this data isn’t exactly wonderfull, but at least they TRY to protect it.
“When the American government came knocking for user’s data – both Yahoo and Microsoft handed it over without batting an eyelid. Google refused, and took it to court.”
Good point, and congrats to Google.
But why didn’t they also care for the democratic rights of the Chinese people to get access to free and critical information too?
That is simply Chinese law – Google didn’t fold to government pressure, they folded to their own pressure not to be left out in the fastest growing economy in the world. Imagine millions of people growing up only on Yahoo? They’d have little inclination later in life to use Google services.
And even then, Google’s china page stated when searches were being restricted, to aid the user. So they didn’t do too bad, given the laws they had to abide by.
“That is simply Chinese law”
It was also law in Nazi Germany to persecute Jews and other such people. And guess what, some non-German international companies helped them in that mission too by selling equipment etc… Internationally accepted human rights should always be valued more than local laws that can be wrong too, especially in totalitarian countries.
“not to be left out in the fastest growing economy in the world”
In other words: money mattered more than human rights.
However, as I already said earlier, I agree that Google is not particularly “bad”, especially when compared to many other companies.
But it just always pisses me off when I notice how lots of people are ready to sell human rights and other high ideals (that make this world a much better place to live for us all) just to get more money for themselves. If people just said “no” to totalitarian rulers willing to use them in their plans instead of “yes, sir, I’ll ge glad to do whatever you wish”, dictators would have much less chances to rule, and we would have avoided many bad things in history.
So if you were a doctor in Nazi germany, would you have stopped treating innocent German patients just because you weren’t able to also help *** patients?
“I’d like to find another search engine if someone could recommend a good one?”
How about:
ASK
Dogpile – metasearch engine
incywincy – “under web” engine
Too bad Northernlight went under.
I might take issue with the term “evil,” but I share some of your concerns. For search, I use Scroogle:
http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html [Google results]
http://www.scroogle.org/scraper7.html [Yahoo results]
I like Scroogle, because they drop all records of your search after a week.
Then there is Clusty:
http://clusty.com/
Clusty does a very good job as an aggregator, and they are no where near as aggressive in the data collection department.
For e-mail, when you can get full domain hosting for $30 a year, e-mail isn’t much of an issue. I find Fastmail one of the best free/pay e-mail services out there.
http://fastmail.net/
It’s called survival.
Oh yeah another attack on Google…. since when acquisition are “evil”. I am pretty sure some of those were quite happy to get some of Google’s money.
If you need a new search engine, google one, LOL.
PS: “perfect 10” story is outdated considering Supreme court rules that Google did not infringe copyright.
Edited 2007-05-17 15:53 UTC
So basically the gist of it is that Google is evil because they want to be a successful corporation by extending globally (and therefore having to abide by France and China’s laws among others), acquiring other companies (eat or be eaten as they say), and acquiring massive collections of user data (the only truly valuable asset they own besides a household brand name).
It seems like the community has to brand every company as evil when they get too successful. There was a time when people actually *GASP* liked *GASP* Microsoft and rooted for them as they fought against big bad IBM. Then people rooted for Red Hat as they fought against Microsoft. Then people became afraid that Red Hat would be the “Microsoft of Linuxes” so they started to root for other community driven distros that couldn’t become too commercialized.
Unfortunately, corporations have obligations to their employees and stock holders to do as well financially speaking as possible so that stock holders make money and employees continue to collect pay checks. Sometimes the best way to make that money treads on some shaky ethical ground. This is all shades of grey with Google right now. None of the author’s examples were truly evil. Government meddling in the Internet is hardly Google’s fault. I also think that our generation has to accept that privacy is going away forever. We all live in glass fish bowls, at least as far as our personal data is concerned. It’s the price we have to pay for all the great “free” stuff we have access to on the Internet. I’m not saying this is good or bad, it just IS.
Edited 2007-05-17 16:07
Actually, corporations don’t have obligations to anyone. Corporations do not “feel”. Corporations do not have “morals”. Corporations only care about profit. This is the first thing you learn in economics. Profit by any means necessary. They usually don’t break law but do it if they can get away with it. They do amoral acts if they can get away with it. They would do anything if they can get away with it and of course the more profit the better.
You might say that “the people of company XXX are good guys etc.”. Well they might be, for some years until the company is run by shareholders (in other words, big enough) and those only care about money. The new managers always only care about money.
Rule of thumb, the bigger they are, the more evil they go.
You just made an unsubstatiated leap from profit-motivated to “evil.” It seems to me that reasoning like this begs the question.
“They usually don’t break law but do it if they can get away with it. They do amoral acts if they can get away with it. They would do anything if they can get away with it and of course the more profit the better.”
Actually, “they” dont do anything. People do amoral acts, people will do anything they can if they can get away with it and people are the ones that will profit at any cost. Saying that it’s the corporations that does this is just a convenient way to shift the blame onto an anonymous entity and make yourself not feel guilty.
Edited 2007-05-18 03:56
I’m by no means validating Googles actions, but it myths me how on the one hand people demand free web services (e-mail et al) and on the other hand whinge when their e-mails get scanned for advertising perposes.
The simple answer to this is to ‘let your feet do the talking'(so to speak) and refuse to use Google for your mail. It’s hardly an expense renting a mailserver and dot-com these days (it’s as little as 10GBP/month for the complete package) so why do business with a company you don’t trust?
I dont think it’s really what google does that bothers people but what it does *considering* the “dont be evil” part of their business model.
Of course, if you actually believed in that “Don’t be evil” bullsh1t for more than 5 seconds you should probably seek psychiatric help.
I don’t know if buying a company is evil.
If we’re going to criticize them, we should criticize them for actual bad things they have done, such as the ubiquitous Google Toolbar that scans your computer without informing you what it’s taken. I like Google’s web-based stuff, but I’ll never use any of their downloadable software.
It’s your loss…Google Earth, Picasa and SketchUp are *amazing* applications.
Sure Picasa is nice, but it basically locks you into using the Picasa photo hosting service. Meanwhile I may not have a snazzy app, but I’m much happier with my free, infinite storage on Yahoo Photos, thank you very much.
I don’t know if buying a company is evil.
Well, not just any company, but Doubleclick:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2…
If you don’t want your business to be associated with anything evil, then buying Doubleclick probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
Fairly muddy read. Most of the historical data was hard to sort out – was Google evil for putting books online for search? Much of the historical data presented made Goodle seem heroic, standing up against those who want to repress information – like the books example and the Youtube example.
The only real “evil” presented was the Double-click purchase, which remains to be seen what Google will do. Perhaps they will be “good” for Double-click.
The only point of the article really seems to be that “All you data are belong to Google”. Therefore, the only real evil presented is that someday Google “might” do something evil with it. This is true of AOL, your ISP, your Bank, your Pastor, etc, etc.
Whatever.
Double Click…hey aren’t they the guys that leave those anoying cookies all over my computer which causes my spyware scanner to “warn” me of all those potential “threats”??
Not “all over,” no, but spyware scanners tend to overreact about them, yes (at worst they’re a tracking privacy risk, not spyware; though they’re indicative of adware activity in the same way they’re indicative of any web activity).
Forgive me if somebody’s already pointed this out, but this acquisition could mean a _less_ annoying DoubleClick than before.
Suddenly, I don’t care who owns the add space.
Amen to that. Don’t forget NoScript and RIP too. I had to use IE on someone else’s PC and thought I went to a different website. The web sure looks different with all those ads.
Together with NoScript and TrackMeNot, you’re on a real winner
Edited 2007-05-18 11:29
What book is that exactly?
I was going to post an lengthy reply full of insightful arguments and supportive links, but The Traper and Fretnator already did that – so I’m just going to yell.
The majority of Google’s critics are major media outlets who need stories, and overly reactionary twats like this kid. Making a few hard choices, and being FORCED to follow the laws of countries like China hardly makes them an evil empire. We’re really making mountains out of mole hills here. Google isn’t the RIAA/MPAA – they aren’t suing underprivlaged girls living in the projects. They aren’t Microsoft buying out and then closing down the compitition. They don’t push people around with smug superiority like Apple (and before anyone starts I have an iMac and I love it). Hell, there are Linux based companies with worse track records. And as far as the Google vs. China thing goes – does anyone remember the Adopt a Blog project? It’s not like there isn’t a way around China’s censorship, it just requires people go out and find answers on their own, instead of sitting around waiting for someone to bring them the answer (and usually bitching when it isn’t what they wanted).
Sorry for the angry tone here, it wasn’t my intent to be this abrupt. But things like this drive me nuts. Of all the unscrupulous companies we could be looking at, our author decides to take Fox-News-Attention-Getter pot shots at Google. It’s just sad.
“being FORCED to follow the laws of countries like China”
In what ways were they – or other Western IT companies for that matter – forced to follow the will of the leading elite in China – when they helped to eliminate free access to critical (not accepted by the Chinese comunist party) information from the Chinese people?
Google is not a Chinese company, and they could have easily refused not to restrict their search results in China. Only reason why they didn’t was money. They counted that someone else might get their share of the huge emerging Chinese Internet market if they didn’t do what the Chinese communist party asked them to do.
In my opinion, the readiness to abandon and sell the principles of free democratic societies in order to gain a position in the markets of totalitarian un-democratic countries, is by far the biggest “evil” thing (mentioned in the article) that companies like Google (or also western governments) have done. But Google is certainly not alone but just one small example.
Now Chinese elite has succeeded in, for example, mostly removing the memory of the Tiananmen Square democratic protests and the following massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989) from the memory of especially young people in China, and generally gain tighter control of the lives and thoughts of Chinese people, with the help from many western companies.
Anyway, I agree that using words like good and evil is a bit too harsh in this case. Google is neither good nor evil, it is just doing what probably most other big companies do: they may often be ready to sacrifice liberty of communication and other such higher ideals if it means more money for them.
Edited 2007-05-17 19:28
I don’t think you undestand quite how powerful the Chinese government is internally. It is not a demoncracy – there is nobody you can complain to, protests are illegal. If Google had offered unfiltered searches, and then denied to comply when asked by the government, a bunch of government officers and police men would break into the Google office and cart off the employess to jail, without trial, to dissappear under the rug and not be heard of again.
I’m starting to prefer alltheweb.com for many searches. Google just gets tiring to look at, such as the way you can do a search on “duck farts” and get a whole column of fake hits that say stuff like “compare prices on duck farts at price.com” and “find duck farts on ebay” etc.
You just listed one of the reasons I find myself using Google less and less. When I try to search for something I get a lot of unrelated results.
LOL. I think I am going to try some “intersting” combinations just to see how they play out. How about “compare prices on cheap prostitutes at price.com”?
Unfortunately AllTheWeb is now owned by Yahoo!, whose privacy policy is considerably more “evil” than Google’s.
That’s what ad blocking is for.
If you have a bad reputation, make everyone look just as bad so you don’t look so bad.
Perhaps by buying Doubleclick, Google can clean the company up and legitimize them.
None of today’s tech corps are “evil”. “Evil” is so abused and misused on tech message boards that it’s nearly lost all meaning.
When I think of “evil” companies, I think of wanton polluters, scam artists (like Enron), abusers of slave labor (e.g. IG Farben, likely the most evil corporation in history, who used forced *** labor, working them until they could work no more, and then shipped them off to be exterminated during the holocaust).
Using “evil” for any of today’s tech companies severely trivializes the word.
(Notwithstanding that Google does invite the word to be used against them, since they loudly proclaim themselves to not be “evil” (and thereby imply that others are such).)
The Oxford American Dictionary defines evil as “profoundly immoral and malevolent”
I cannot tack that word onto any web 2.0 companies. The web is known for exaggerating everything to epic proportions though.
(my emphasis added)
Everything? Isn’t that a tad… exaggerated?
..with Google as long as they continue to provide their services to casual users for free, in exchange of those non intrusive ads. If they start charging for the services… that becomes another story.
“with Google as long as they continue to provide their services to casual users for free,”
This is awesome reasoning. Really. Hey, as long as I can get stuff for free I really dont care what’s going on.
I guess we’d all be living under the jackboot heel by now if Hitler had only had sense enough to give stuff away for free.
…this is what happens when you become too rich. No one should ever be allowed to have that much money (ie power).
Right?
Well, the old adage goes the same way with s/money/power/.
However, the “money” version tends to get twisted, digested by a slippery-slope argument, and turned into oppressive and authoritarian economic policy… so I steer away from that.
Correct, and as a public service I would like to help some of you too-rich people out with your burden. I wouldn’t want you to have to carry it alone!
Yeah, just look at what Warren Buffet did with his money.
Oh, wait.
In my view: Blocking Microsoft from acquiring DoubleClick = “Don’t Be Evil”.
>Perfect 10
Perfect 10 suit isn’t over:
Weird, I wouldn’t have even noted this, except I went to news.google.com -> osnews -> perfect 10 ( it has some good selection! – at least on the cover.. ) -> news.google.com -> to:
http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1305749.php/Google_…
(google wins appeal over perfect 10.)
It all seems kind of incestuous…
>saving/searching e-mail
Anywho, who says yahoo doesn’t save your e-mails? I certainly haven’t seen any claims that they don’t. I always hear this from people who say I should drop my gmail acoount. Then I ask them “And yahoo doesn’t save or search your e-mails?”. And then they usually just give me a blank look that says “Oh…”.
>Doubleclick
They aren’t just an ad business with some “questionable” practices – they started off using straight spyware, and not cookies. As in programs that install and attempt to hide themselves and gather information at all times (I’ve ran into some and did some basic reversing of it). In other words practices that are now _illegal_. This is by far the most worrisome move google has made. Granted, they’ve supposedly cleaned up their act…
Oh, google buys Waste Management. Granted, it has roots in businesses that were run by the _mob_, but they’re clean now… really…
“don’t be evil” was brilliant marketing before Google went public. Google has a duty to its share holders to be evil if the situation may require.
Thems the breaks.
Google is a diffrent type of company. Coming out of a University Project. Till now Google had made our life easier.Here ‘I’ is me not the ugly and big corporations who monpolise.
In computer industry its always like that. Micorsoft OS, HP Printers, Intel Processors, Symbian Smart Phone OS, ARM embedded Processor, nvidia Graphics and so on.
Considering the given monoploy who is providing us with best services and satisfaction is important here.
Google is providing best search engine and lightining fast gmail. So, whats the problem with that
See Computing is being revoutionized and Company like google is helping us whether its search engine,Adsense,gmail and for that matter google’s other services . But at the end you are doing business. Important point is even after that who is providing best service.
Edited 2007-05-18 05:20
The machinations of the software industry are not evil and, anybody who thinks otherwise, needs a healthy dose of reality.
The existence of google is and was a bare necessity for me personal.Google has been of great help to search for rare bugs or configurations present and today.
If only people would be a little more aware of all the residu of their internet presence they transmit due to inadequately configured systems.That’s hardly the fault of Google.Anyway i hope google stays forever.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you. I would bet this idea of google morphing into an ‘evil empire’ ala microsoft will gain momentum in the years to come.
Lets face it though, since the internet started up in the early 90s it was a mess… and continued to be a mess until google.
gmail, google news and least of all google searches have transformed the web into a somewhat manageable place for people of ALL languages. how many of these alternative services people mention in their posts support so many languages.
Face it google is here to stay, and given how powerful they will become… we should be afraid. But this may be the price we pay for having an organised world wide web.