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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.
We're more likely to lose public libraries than gain a public search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'd say the real thing I'm amazed at is just how long google has remained the go-to search engine. Results have been juuust passable for about five or six years now, when once they were very good.
Google proved that every so often, you need to refresh search not by "tweaking the algorithm" but by moving to a whole new algorithm, to defeat SEO spam. So why hasn't anyone dethroned them yet, it's long overdue. Is it just that the the expense of initially building the database at google's start was a much lower barrier to entry for newcomers than it is now?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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?!
That is like saying that it is inconceivable that a person, being a product of Darwin, would do anything other than what is necessary to survive and reproduce, that is, behave 100% selfishly.
Fact is, being selfish turns out, in many cases, to decrease chances of said reproduction. It may be indirect (i.e. people figure out they can't trust you, you lose friends, you don't find a spouse, you don't have anyone to help you out when bad things happen to you, etc)
Same thing happens with corporations. Behaving purely "selfishly" (i.e. do everything to maximize profits) can have the opposite effect. (i.e. you have to pay a lot higher saleries if you want to hire the best and brightest, you lose customers because they think you are evil, etc)
I'm not saying anything one way or the other about Google, I'm just saying I disagree with the simplistic notion that all corporations, large or small, will only act in ways to maximize profits....or your implication that "being a good citizen" can't be a viable strategy toward maximizing profits.
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.
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?
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.
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?
God forbid someone sent a book every year to every person in the US with the home addresses and phone numbers of everyone in their areas. Society would itself collapse. Oh wait.
If you think street view makes you more vulnerable to anything than you're delusional and paranoid.
It was, by comparison. When Google first started it was vastly superior to the keyword-spammed search engines such as Altavista, Infoseek, Yahoo, etc. You could type in a word and would likely get what you were looking for in the first page or two -- rather than on page 10, or 30 with the other engines.
The problem is, that Google has not improved. Google Instant does not improve Search -- it's annoying and turns up the same results. Their new image search does not improve the results, just makes it slower to load.
13 years later, and not only is Search not any better, it's actually worse. People have long ago figured out how to game Google. Comparison site scams often appear as the top links on search terms (especially moreso on google.co.uk -- being the site the article is actually about). Wikipedia appears as spam as the top link on almost everything, even when that page is a stub, or just plain crap (due to the skewed page rank of the site -- not the individual page). Searching for an hotel is near impossible. Searching for a product is near impossible. Searching for anything local is near impossible -- you just end up with comparison site spam every time.
The other search engines are currently no better, so there's no point in switching. They, like Google, are corporate monoliths that are almost incapable of innovation.
Search is not going to improve until someone does what Brin and Page did. Two guys with a good idea cobbled together from spare parts in a garage somewhere.
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.