Google About Openness

sopssa writes "Several sites, including TechCrunch and The Register, are reporting about an email Google's VP Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. 'At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyone's benefit."

Comments

Re:And why should they?

[dintech]

Why should they open up everything? They're open in areas that aren't their primary business.

Exactly. They're open in places that are other people's primary business. They only want to prevent competitors having a monopolies, not themselves.

Re:Typical proprietary bullshit

[ArsonSmith]

"...opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to "game" our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone."

Or it may help you improve your code to fight against people trying to game the system and create better searching for all.

This just reeks of the standard, "We have to be closed for security reasons." crap argument put out by proprietary whores all the time.

Re:Say they do...

[TheGratefulNet]

the first page of ANY search (bing, yahoo, google, you name it) has SALES this and BUY that all over it.

I look for chip data (pinouts and things like that). I find mostly sales and not even legit sales, most of the time. try to find DATA and you're way beyond first page in any search.

don't give me this 'google has magic results' crap. they sold out just like all the rest. I have yet to find a useful search engine that isn't already gamed, somehow. we now need post-processors of this so called aggregators just to weed out THEIR insane junk that didn't need to be part of a search result.

maybe 5 or more years ago, google had the edge on search. but now, their results are no better than any other.

the thing is, back when they WERE good, they programmed us all to get used to 'googling' for info. now that they suck, we don't notice quite as much since we still continue to 'google' for info. like I said, none of the engines give useful user-oriented results anymore but that does include our 'dear' google, as well.