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Is Google Polluting the Internet?
Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"
PS google is willing to invade my privacy and yours with street view; can you do streetview for the personal residences of Page and Brin and the directors and senior executives of Google ?
Yes, you can. I did a quick Google search for [larry page's home address], the first result listed his address, and then Google Maps was happy to provide me with both aerial photos and street view.
Err., you do realize that they've publicly stated several times that if you simply ask to have your house censored, they will? They're also implementing face-recognition (obviously no perfect).
While I agree that Google's here to get profits, their actions have been balanced (IMHO). Take, for example, the Android Market. The app purchase price goes to Developers + Cell companies (0% to Google, they get a $15 one time developer license), and the advertising in said apps is open to any company (not just Admob). They get their "cut" from the behaviour analysis. Sure, one could say it's the only way to achieve marketshare, but the net result is that they don't make as much money as some other companies do by being insanely greedy.
P.S. Google is a) a search engine *AND* a way to generate profits for them. Just because one is true doesn't mean the other isn't. I find most of what I'm looking for on the first page or two.
causing every website that uses Google Analytics and YouTube to take a horrendous time to load. It didn't used to be this way, but within the past year Google's non-search infrastructure has really not scaled very well.
Money and power are just two parts of the many levels of human motivation.
Anarchists never rule
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=100+Waverley+Oaks+Ct,+Palo+Alto,+CA+94301&sll=40.673259,-73.961483&sspn=0.00887,0.01914&ie=UTF8&ll=37.43413,-122.140181&spn=0.009286,0.01914&t=h&z=16&iwloc=addr
It's right there. Beautiful house, BTW.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Yes, Google do a huge amount of statistical reasoning to give users what they want. On one hand, this allows a system to scale and seem magically quick, because individual users forget how they are not really so unique, posing the same queries that hundreds or thousands of other users have been querying in the same days, hours, or minutes. On the other hand, it presents a tyranny of the majority, where the "best" result is the result most users wanted for that query.
If you really want to do better than this, you need to add your mood or intent to the search query. Don't search for widget, but search for "how to frob widget" or "widget frobbing reviews" etc. Similarly, if you really do want to purchase something uncommon, it helps to search for "widget price" or "widget sale" instead of just "widget" which might take you to the encyclopedic information if that's what people most commonly want.
The newer AJAX features of Google really make it more obvious how the system is indexing and reusing searches. Type widget and see the many different search suggestions that show up. Type a few more keywords and see how the suggestions change, before you even submit the query. It's a bit like crowd-sourcing of a Yahoo-style directory: you can see how different sets of keywords are creating a taxonomy of search results.
Do Larry and Sergey really feel this way? It'd certainly be interesting if they did and to hear them describe those opinions. However, it seems like White's article is making uninformed suppositions simply for the purpose of being provocative. In particular, the underlying article states:
With a link to a Google Answers page which indicates:
This is a practice that has existed on Google pages since the very beginning. Nobody's selling the top search result here. Anyone who's used Google before would see that all the ads are separated from search results and clearly labeled as ads.
Uhhh.. you mean like their "More Search Tools -> Fewer Shopping Sites" option?