More evidence of Evil Google?

dspguru.com

7 points·mrkd··6 comments

So Google invest huge amounts of money in building a killer search index, the author wants to then mine all of that data, putting extra load on their infrastructure, Google blocks him. That's evil?

No, he then tried to use a $100 adwords giftcard and got rejected...then he declared G eval.

I think he might not actually know the definition of the word... maybe he thinks evil == inconvenient to him.

Serving queries to bots is quite expensive. I once heard someone estimate that until Google started tackling it substantially, scrapers burned a datacenter's worth of traffic all by themselves.

But that's not the point of the article -- the author of the article agreed with that. And he was sorry for it, and sent a nice mail to excuse for his malbehaviour.

It seems his point is that it is very hard to get to actually speak to a human or even get a human reply with Google. If they decide to cut you off (of adwords, or the search engine) there is no real way to appeal or sometimes, even to know why it happened.

Google is in no way alone in this, though. I've heard similar things about Apple, Amazon, etc. It's pretty scary of today's companies.

This guy is, in the words of Monty Python, "The type what causes unrest." Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I cannot say.

I do think there is a problem with large companies not quickly addressing problems like this. I have a friend who has run into trouble with adwords, and although it did take quite a bit of work, he eventually got the problem resolved.

I don't think this can be characterized as "Google is evil."

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