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

With all due respect

[SteweyGriffin]

"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."

With all due respect to Google, Eric Schmidt, and Sergay Brin, that statement almost sounds evil in and of itself.

I don't mean to flame folks here, but what if another company decided that their entire philosophy revolved around what their own CEO thought about things? What if this CEO was raised poorly, and without religion, and generally was a mean, racially prejucided man?

Google is an industry leader in the realm of Web search. They are moving into new technology areas as well, such as image searches, Usenet searches, product searches, directory searches, Web page caching, etc. What happens if Brin one day is the victim of a hate crime by a white person? Will he start blocking Google from indexing predominantly white Web sites such as J. Crew, Kuro5hin, or the New York Islanders home page?

It sounds good at first, but upon deeper exploration you'll see that it's:
a.) Childish
b.) Poorly thought-out
c.) Discriminatory
d.) A disservice to Internet users

I, for one, will no longer visit Google because I simply can't trust them anymore. I urge others to as well. AllTheWeb is nearly catching up to Google anyway, and is at least as good if not better.

Re:I agree.

[Fnkmaster]

You mean sluts don't love jism? Oh, sorry. :) Every human being compartmentalizes. I mean, otherwise how do you explain women who are very serious professional career women when they are at work, but yet, when in the bedroom they screw like minxes and scream holler and yell "fuck me harder". People are different in the bedroom. The state of sexual arousal undoutedly does lead people to do things and look at things that they compartmentalize out of the rest of their lives. This, I think, is one of the realities of being human. Whether you are a Freudian and believe that the "id" takes over or whatever matters not to me. Hormones flow freely, testosterone starts pumping, adrenaline is flowing, whatever it is.

Then afterwards, people go back to their normal boring lives. So I honestly don't see how you think this is so abnormal. Compartmentalization is actually an evolved defense mechanism that lets us live with all sorts of logical inconsistencies and dillemmas and other sorts of misery in our day-to-day lives and still function normally.