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"Don't be evil? isn't it a bit too late for that? They already crossed the line in my book."



HOW?

Well the article does actually go into this, I don't know if you read it?

if you don't want use googles evil engine you can always use www.live.com

However evil Google is (or isn't), It is better to have the diversity/competition of 2 evil companies, rather than just Microsoft(owns live.com) being one arch-evil company.

"hey scan the emails of their gmail users, and they keep your search history. That makes them evil in my book. In fact, I'd like to find another search engine if someone could recommend a good one?"

Hey dude.... Sweaty Steve Balmar the MS Highschool Football coach say MSNs search engine is better... go use their's and dont let the door hit you and the arse!

When the American government came knocking for user's data - both Yahoo and Microsoft handed it over without batting an eyelid. Google refused, and took it to court.

exact. Saving al this data isn't exactly wonderfull, but at least they TRY to protect it.

"When the American government came knocking for user's data - both Yahoo and Microsoft handed it over without batting an eyelid. Google refused, and took it to court."

Good point, and congrats to Google.
But why didn't they also care for the democratic rights of the Chinese people to get access to free and critical information too?

That is simply Chinese law - Google didn't fold to government pressure, they folded to their own pressure not to be left out in the fastest growing economy in the world. Imagine millions of people growing up only on Yahoo? They'd have little inclination later in life to use Google services.

And even then, Google's china page stated when searches were being restricted, to aid the user. So they didn't do too bad, given the laws they had to abide by.

"That is simply Chinese law"

It was also law in Nazi Germany to persecute Jews and other such people. And guess what, some non-German international companies helped them in that mission too by selling equipment etc... Internationally accepted human rights should always be valued more than local laws that can be wrong too, especially in totalitarian countries.

"not to be left out in the fastest growing economy in the world"

In other words: money mattered more than human rights.

However, as I already said earlier, I agree that Google is not particularly "bad", especially when compared to many other companies.

But it just always pisses me off when I notice how lots of people are ready to sell human rights and other high ideals (that make this world a much better place to live for us all) just to get more money for themselves. If people just said "no" to totalitarian rulers willing to use them in their plans instead of "yes, sir, I'll ge glad to do whatever you wish", dictators would have much less chances to rule, and we would have avoided many bad things in history.

So if you were a doctor in Nazi germany, would you have stopped treating innocent German patients just because you weren't able to also help *** patients?

"I'd like to find another search engine if someone could recommend a good one?"

How about:

ASK
Dogpile - metasearch engine
incywincy - "under web" engine

Too bad Northernlight went under.

I might take issue with the term "evil," but I share some of your concerns. For search, I use Scroogle:

http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html [Google results]
http://www.scroogle.org/scraper7.html [Yahoo results]

I like Scroogle, because they drop all records of your search after a week.

Then there is Clusty:
http://clusty.com/

Clusty does a very good job as an aggregator, and they are no where near as aggressive in the data collection department.

For e-mail, when you can get full domain hosting for $30 a year, e-mail isn't much of an issue. I find Fastmail one of the best free/pay e-mail services out there.

http://fastmail.net/

Actually, corporations don't have obligations to anyone. Corporations do not "feel". Corporations do not have "morals". Corporations only care about profit. This is the first thing you learn in economics. Profit by any means necessary. They usually don't break law but do it if they can get away with it. They do amoral acts if they can get away with it. They would do anything if they can get away with it and of course the more profit the better.

You might say that "the people of company XXX are good guys etc.". Well they might be, for some years until the company is run by shareholders (in other words, big enough) and those only care about money. The new managers always only care about money.

Rule of thumb, the bigger they are, the more evil they go.

You just made an unsubstatiated leap from profit-motivated to "evil." It seems to me that reasoning like this begs the question.

"They usually don't break law but do it if they can get away with it. They do amoral acts if they can get away with it. They would do anything if they can get away with it and of course the more profit the better."

Actually, "they" dont do anything. People do amoral acts, people will do anything they can if they can get away with it and people are the ones that will profit at any cost. Saying that it's the corporations that does this is just a convenient way to shift the blame onto an anonymous entity and make yourself not feel guilty.

Edited 2007-05-18 03:56

I dont think it's really what google does that bothers people but what it does *considering* the "dont be evil" part of their business model.
Of course, if you actually believed in that "Don't be evil" bullsh1t for more than 5 seconds you should probably seek psychiatric help.

It's your loss...Google Earth, Picasa and SketchUp are *amazing* applications.

Sure Picasa is nice, but it basically locks you into using the Picasa photo hosting service. Meanwhile I may not have a snazzy app, but I'm much happier with my free, infinite storage on Yahoo Photos, thank you very much.

I don't know if buying a company is evil.

Well, not just any company, but Doubleclick:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2...

If you don't want your business to be associated with anything evil, then buying Doubleclick probably wasn't the smartest thing to do.

Not "all over," no, but spyware scanners tend to overreact about them, yes (at worst they're a tracking privacy risk, not spyware; though they're indicative of adware activity in the same way they're indicative of any web activity).

Forgive me if somebody's already pointed this out, but this acquisition could mean a _less_ annoying DoubleClick than before.

Amen to that. Don't forget NoScript and RIP too. I had to use IE on someone else's PC and thought I went to a different website. The web sure looks different with all those ads.

Together with NoScript and TrackMeNot, you're on a real winner

Edited 2007-05-18 11:29

"being FORCED to follow the laws of countries like China"

In what ways were they - or other Western IT companies for that matter - forced to follow the will of the leading elite in China - when they helped to eliminate free access to critical (not accepted by the Chinese comunist party) information from the Chinese people?

Google is not a Chinese company, and they could have easily refused not to restrict their search results in China. Only reason why they didn't was money. They counted that someone else might get their share of the huge emerging Chinese Internet market if they didn't do what the Chinese communist party asked them to do.

In my opinion, the readiness to abandon and sell the principles of free democratic societies in order to gain a position in the markets of totalitarian un-democratic countries, is by far the biggest "evil" thing (mentioned in the article) that companies like Google (or also western governments) have done. But Google is certainly not alone but just one small example.

Now Chinese elite has succeeded in, for example, mostly removing the memory of the Tiananmen Square democratic protests and the following massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989) from the memory of especially young people in China, and generally gain tighter control of the lives and thoughts of Chinese people, with the help from many western companies.

Anyway, I agree that using words like good and evil is a bit too harsh in this case. Google is neither good nor evil, it is just doing what probably most other big companies do: they may often be ready to sacrifice liberty of communication and other such higher ideals if it means more money for them.

Edited 2007-05-17 19:28

I don't think you undestand quite how powerful the Chinese government is internally. It is not a demoncracy - there is nobody you can complain to, protests are illegal. If Google had offered unfiltered searches, and then denied to comply when asked by the government, a bunch of government officers and police men would break into the Google office and cart off the employess to jail, without trial, to dissappear under the rug and not be heard of again.

You just listed one of the reasons I find myself using Google less and less. When I try to search for something I get a lot of unrelated results.

Unfortunately AllTheWeb is now owned by Yahoo!, whose privacy policy is considerably more "evil" than Google's.

That's what ad blocking is for.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines evil as "profoundly immoral and malevolent"

I cannot tack that word onto any web 2.0 companies. The web is known for exaggerating everything to epic proportions though.

"with Google as long as they continue to provide their services to casual users for free,"

This is awesome reasoning. Really. Hey, as long as I can get stuff for free I really dont care what's going on.
I guess we'd all be living under the jackboot heel by now if Hitler had only had sense enough to give stuff away for free.

Well, the old adage goes the same way with s/money/power/.

However, the "money" version tends to get twisted, digested by a slippery-slope argument, and turned into oppressive and authoritarian economic policy... so I steer away from that.

Yeah, just look at what Warren Buffet did with his money.

Oh, wait.