Google vs. Evil

wideangle writes "'The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business. Take Brin's decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public.'"

Comments

Not to mention their wacky gun policy.

[rebelcool]

Not only do they refuse to advertise for guns, but they won't advertise companies that even sell parts for guns.

To be even stranger, the advertisements are usually not even about guns - just the company may happen to also sell parts.

One case comes to mind of an outdoorsman shop wanted to advertise its dehydrated food wares. In addition to hundreds of other outdoors materials, they sold replacement pistol barrels (they did NOT however, sell actual guns)

Google refused the ads on food on the premise of this.

Re:It makes sense

[pVoid]

On a funny note,

Porn is religiously 'evil', whereas cigarettes aren't.

Go figure.

Alcohol and Cigarettes and harmful

[danny256]

porn is not. We all look at porn, no matter how much you guys deny it. I found my first porn on yahoo when I was 11 years old and I havn't stopped. I don't think I'm too screwed up, or any more so than if I'd never found the porn. How many kids get through there childhood without one of their friends showing them a dirty magazine or something? not too many, its a just a part of life. Porn isn't evil, just like masturbation isn't evil, I think these are outdated views that need to be revised.

Re:Alcohol and Cigarettes and harmful

[div_2n]

Alcohol in and of itself is not bad for you. The abuse of it, however, is bad for you.

If the fact that too much alcohol is can damage your health means that it is harmful then you might as well add food, oxygen, water, exercise, sexual orgasms, sunlight and sleep.

Too much of any good thing can and usually is a bad thing.

Since google isn't publicly held...

[hillct]

The owners can set whatever policies they see fit. It is, of course in their interest to set policies that do not alienate their userbase, and do not drive away advertisers. Given google's past success, it's reasonable to assume these sorts of considerations play into all their business decisions.

Specifically, on the issue of accepting ads for adult content, this is reasonable in the specific case of a search engine and especially in the case of google's AdWords mechanism, because the users who will see the ads for adult content, will only be those who are specifically searching for adult content. Google has been quite successful with their targeted advertising program, which makes it all the more valuable to it's niche advertisers such as adult content providers. So long as the ads are effectively targeted to users who are currently viewing search results containing sited having such content, ads for similar content shouldn't be an issue.

--CTH