Don't be evil - that's my job.
How much Google is too much? Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks we need more, and I suppose that’s not surprising, coming from the company cheese. Schmidt isn’t overly concerned with allegations that the search giant is overstepping its bounds and pooh-poohs the notion that Google might be too intrusive. After all,
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Personal privacy? You don’t need no steenkin’ privacy. Copyrights? A trivial matter! Even the far Lefty SFGate is beginning to recognize the ominous presence that lurks in its own back yard.
Google Books is a prime example, [Rob Enderle, technology analyst with the Enderle Group] said. It’s an open debate whether the plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online will prove the benefit to humanity that Google promises – or hand it a monopoly over certain digital works, as opponents allege.
But the consensus is the company fomented an avoidable backlash by forging ahead with its controversial plan without consulting the parties with the most at stake. Authors and publishers responded with lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.
Google “had the power to do it and so thought ‘why not?’ ” Enderle said. “That’s the core of how a company goes from being seen as friendly to being seen as evil.”
If you control the access to the books, or to the search results, you control the content. Certainly Google would never tamper with search content. Right? Just ask Sarah Palin. Maybe it’s time to step away from the Google behemoth.
(GoogleBot image courtesy of TechRave)
I gave up on Google a few years ago when their terminal inability to recognize certain, dear, holidays became too much. (That and, of course, their rank hypocrisy enshrined in their motto “Do no evil” when they’re out there doing it every day.)
I’ve been thinking about de-googling for a while but the lure of Google Apps is still too great to go through the work of disengaging myself and my clients… I can see I’ll have to though. It’s inevitable.
I like it better than Yahoo, which keeps changing its home page around, and gives you crummy search results, and always infuriated me with its ridiculously biased AP stories on the front page.
But I’m kinda suspicious of Google, too. I’ve heard a couple stories about how Google censored or threatened to censor a blogspot blogs, which is one significant reason why I moved to wordpress instead of blogspot (Along with what I had heard, I also compared the explicit threats of censorship between the two sites, as listed in their terms of service). And like ECM said, for a long time they were recognizing silly holidays like the anniversary of Sesame Street but failing to honor Veteran’s Day. For some reason, all these computer people seem to be really liberal.
And on top of that, imo Youtube continues to go downhill with Google running it.
I’ve recently gone Bing, and it works about as google with less bias.