I feel like everybody has been brainwashed into thinking Google is awesome and I'm looking at it from a distance, thinking how did they do this.... Tech conferences? Yearly Google io PR?
Somehow people is treating this ad company like they are good guys.
That has obviously changed over the past couple years, in a slow creeping way.
In fact they are probably worse, given how much personal information they hold on people and how willing they are to ignore local laws and regulations.
Not really sure that was ever the case?
I remember when they originally launched - with the "Do No Evil" motto - thinking it was PR bullshit.
If they were "pretty not-evil" at some point, from my PoV it'd have to be before that as I was clearly cynical of them already by then.
It was magnitudes more effective than any marketing I've ever seen Google do. Ethics aside, you could argue that Lifehacker writers should have gotten Google CMO level stock grants.