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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.'"
Please. Not another sink hole.
You pay for the servers, the bandwidth, and the developers, not to mention the managerial and legal overhead, and make it public without making a profit, and nobody will complain.
For those of us living in the real world, Google's a pretty decent option.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I am amazed that people think google is (a) a good search engine, rather then soemthing to generate profit for google, and (b) that as alarge corporation, google can be trusted to do anything other then max profits.
The idea that a large public company like google will do anything other then maximize profits is silly beyond belief;
There is one small exception: if a company is a quasi monopoly, as google is, then it can indulge in some luxuries, like sponsering summer of code; the epitome of this was the old Bell Labs research center in Murray HIll NJ (at least one Nobel Prize for fundamental science, microwave background).
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 ? why doesn't someone start a site, www.seehowitfeels.net, that is just devoted to giving Page and Brin the same privacy that ordinary people have. Bet the lawsuits come soon and often
Google didn't make their index of human knowledge for free you know. If you don't like it, make your own. It will cost you billions of dollars, not just to create, but to keep up to date, up to the second.
We're more likely to lose public libraries than gain a public search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Traditional ads, no. Astroturfing, I'm sure I've been fooled at some point. But it's hardly fair to blame search engines for that.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Yes, but it was corporate money that allowed it to be a great success. It was a combination of their great ideas and serious capital. $25 million in 1999 got them started, and $1.67 billion in 2004 got them where they are today.
I am sorry, you are not going to get a billion dollars to build a non-profit search engine. The OP was correct that you would need a governmental body to accomplish this without corporate money.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
... controlled by the US government (who else would have the means and would volunteer?), the same which will soon have an Internet kill switch and is almost completely submerged by lobbyists? Is it really that much better?
Sounds like something that's right up the EU's alley: creating a public alternative to a foreign-owned monopoly in a critical growth sector.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
No, you're just a leech.
If I ever dare disabling AdBlock+ in my browser, I'll have problems with page load times (=my time) + it will be much harder to concentrate on the content in a presence of distracting animations and other crap (=my productivity). On the road it will also lead to increased bandwidth bill (=my money) and shorter battery life (=productivity)
Who is the leech now?
Ah.... but what if the path is merely a maze going nowhere? A ship in a bottle floating in an endless sea of replicating bots who tirelessly analyze our essence and present false choices in an endless stream of nothingness only with the intent to gain our credit card number...
Suppose for a moment, that we are not just entertaining ourselves to death, but are still empowered by our desires to know the truth, to synthesize information in a free society and hold our ideas as our own, and are not just a copy-write infringed info byte of a subsidiary of a monolithic corporation.
The lesson perhaps? Nothing is free. Everything has a price. Search is free, but the road has a toll...for our soul, our individuality.
This is the 21st century, we gotta get with the program. Block the ads. Pay for your hosting, own your domain... pay your dues. Own your identity. Don't sell yourself for nothing. And remember, always make a backup.
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.
The article says:
"Google was originally conceived to be a commercial-free search engine. Twelve years ago, in the first public documentation of their technology, the inventors of Google warned that advertising corrupts search engines... And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions."
The misunderstanding is obvious. Google's ads are clearly separated from the search result - different style, different background colour. And yet the writer seems to think they are one and the same. It seems he has based an entire article on his own inability to distinguish between ads and search results.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
There's already Bing which is just as capable as Google (bit nicer on Image searches, much worse on Usenet group searches). But even if there were a dozen such rival search engines, the addition of a free, public one, wouldn't solve Internet pollution caused by the mere existence of the commercial search engines. For example, try searching for any remotely obscure technical information and you find the same question and answers popping up again and again because some fucking screen scrapers have ripped off the original thread where it occured and put it on their own site. Not only does that make it harder to find varied answers, but it means that it's hard to find the original site and post followup questions or see if anybody else has. There mere existence of big advertising money distorts the Internet. Only if public search engines replaced commercial ones would Internet pollution be reduced.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Is there anything governmental bodies accomplish in this day and age without corporate money?
Really, why?
The modern world is, whether we like it or not, run by corporations. So, we have corporations like Lockheed Martin developing more weapons to pollute the earth and murder innocent children overseas. Others, like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are actively trying to remove our personal freedoms, to control our every thought with DRM, to destroy free software, to be the real owners of our computers, cellphones, servers, and other gadgets.
On the other hand, we have companies like Google. Don't get me wrong, I'm not buying into the do no evil bullshit, but I can see what they do on my own: They help Free Software projects get where they are going to, they defend free standards, they donate code to the community, they provide valuable services that we use everyday at no cost. And they keep their ads to a minimum, Google is the only company that run ads that don't make you want to tear your eyeballs off. And all it takes to get rid of them is 30 seconds to install adblock.
Really, I have NOTHING bad to say about google. I use their search engine, their email service for both my personal and my company's email, I use google talk, google trends, Android, I am writing this on Chrome, I use google desktop, google maps, Picasa, Youtube, and countless other services and products from Google. And I haven't ever paid a single buck to them. And I block the fucking ads. They are managing to provide countless awesome services, do shitloads of research, and contribute more than anyone else to the Free Software community and to the world. And they are doing that on ads.
People is worried about user privacy, but Google has the best privacy record ever. Mention one single event in which google misused users data? The kind of thing google is doing can't be done without access to user's information. You want your email on the cloud (and you don't want to pay for a dedicated server + bandwidth?). Your data will need to be in somebody's server. Sorry, there's no other way.
And regarding that stupid comment saying that users can't tell the difference between content and advertising? Come on. Adblock can easily tell the difference, and it's a stupid script. My fucking bayesian filter can differentiate content from Spam. If your users can't tell the difference, your users are too fucking stupid.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
This is pretty reasonable to me. For example, when I search Google for the title of a book, I'm looking for the Amazon sale page at least 50% of the time. Lots of people are looking to buy stuff when they search for it on Google, and if Google arbitrarily excludes those results it would dilute the value of the search. If there are too many sales results then clarifying the search by adding or excluding certain terms will usually narrow it down enough.
What would really be interesting is if Google could distinguish between, say, commercial and non-commercial results automatically. It obviously has some capabilities in this regard with its product searching options, and if they could put in something like a (buying/not buying) check box it would mean we could find our results even faster without further clarification of search terms.
Morals only apply to those who can afford them.
In our society, for centuries, thievery has been considered immoral. But we all recognize that when you are starving, in order to feed your family you will steal if necessary. In days past you would be hanged if caught. The interesting thing is that to the person stealing, it is/was moral to do what you can/could to feed your family; while to the well fed, it was moral to hang the thief. The soccer team stranded by plane crash in the Andes Mountains ate their dead compatriots. In poor regions of the world, life is sometimes very cheap when the difference between life and death is thin. In the end, if life is good and you can afford morals, you will have them. It all amounts to how much power you have over your own life. Money is just another way to measure power.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You know what else is right up the EU's alley? Banning references to certain bits of history,
I take it your referring to nazi paraphernalia and propaganda, banned in some EU countries ? Yeah some people are a bit sensitive about allowing a lunitic fringe that (litterally) ruined the entire continent and caused untold suffering for so many to spread their filth in public again. Imagine that; when we say "Nie wieder", "Never again", we mean it.
getting tangled up in astounding fits of political correctness, etc.
Yeah, is the shitstorm about saying "retarded" over yet in the US ? Pot meet kettle.
Do you really want a government that aggressively controls the speech of its citizens to be running a search engine? If you want that, you can go to China.
No I don't want that. Luckily for me, it really doesn't do that.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
You're still the leech. They are providing a service, which is being paid for by advertising. If it bothers you so much, don't use the service.
You display a typical arrogant attitude of many webmasters, who fail to realize that they deal not with some "traffic" or "hits". You deal with human beings. An offline business has very strict rules about being polite to customers - but webmasters still have a weird idea that screaming at your customers "LOOK! you've GOT to watch HERE! and now HERE!" constantly while they are at your territory is the best business plan ever. Who the hell would behave like that in their shop?
You don't get to say "oh stopping to buy a ticket slows me down and get in the say so I'm just going to jump over the turnstile" when you're getting in the subway. The same thing applies to ad supported websites.
Wait... you're not asking them to buy tickets before they enter - no, that would be too honest. You're actively pursuing them. You're doing you best to attract them to your site. You probably deprive other sites of search engine ranks in the process. And then you throw at your readers a bunch of flashy banners, tons of distracting underlined text in different colors (because they look like links and draw attention) and wonder why they protect their sanity and peace of mind? Try communicating to them and be polite - for a start.