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Who's Afraid of Google?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the in-the-end-there-can-be-only-one dept.

Khuffie writes "Wired has an interesting article about who's afraid of Google: in short, almost everyone! "Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.""

5 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. GoogleBase? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    What do you think the "Base" means?

  2. Re:What about... by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 3, Informative
    Actually, very little of what data they collect is in a database/databases. Almost all of the data is managed via the GFS (google file system).

    http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html

    "The file system has successfully met our storage needs. It is widely deployed within Google as the storage platform for the generation and processing of data used by our service as well as research and development efforts that require large data sets. The largest cluster to date provides hundreds of terabytes of storage across thousands of disks on over a thousand machines, and it is concurrently accessed by hundreds of clients."

  3. Re:Beware of Google AI by abigor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ah, good old Mentifex, back again. For those of you who are unaware of the history of one of the Internet's greatest kooks, here is a nice faq.

    http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

  4. Re:What about... by bigpat · · Score: 2, Informative

    When they say DO NO EVIL it may mean do legal things. They have never said we follow some ethics as dicatated by some religion or some community. As long as they do legal things there is no need for them to be afraid of anything.

    You bring up a good point, that they never stated exactly what they view as "evil", but I very much doubt they meant they would merely follow the law. Unless you have the moral fiber of a jellyfish, then you should realize that civil laws are never a good substitute for a more complete system of ethics.

  5. MOD PARENT UP by hkmwbz · · Score: 2, Informative
    I've got karma to spare, so it doesn't matter if this is modded redundant or whatever...

    The parent makes a point which seems to be ignored by a lot of people comparing Google to Microsoft.

    Microsoft were evil from the very beginning!

    The bought a hack of an OS off a guy and sold it to IBM. They lied to and manipulated people. They basically did everything they could to get ahead.

    Unlike Google, which actually tries to be "nice". It's got massive geek cred, and it seems to have done nicely without the kind of anti-competitive tactics that were part of Microsoft's business strategy from the very beginning.

    --
    Clever signature text goes here.