>Mr. Brin still opposed making large-scale efforts to fight spam, because it involved more human intervention. Mr. Brin, whose parents were Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union, even personally decided to allow anti-Semitic sites that were in the results for the query “Jew,” according to people familiar with the decision. Google posted a disclaimer with results for that query saying, “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”
>Finally, in 2004, in the bathroom one day at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Mr. Page approached Ben Gomes, one of Google’s early search executives, to express support for his efforts fighting spam. “Just do what you need to do,” said Mr. Page, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “Sergey is going to ruin this f—ing company.”
I guess money caused it. When you have a market-cap of $900+ billion you’re not going to keep up with promises made back when you were “only” a $90 billion company or a $9 billion company. I remember the pre/IPO days when each index update was followed almost religiously on webmasterworld.com and where an user called Googleguy (supposedly Matt Cutts) was implicitly promising all the website owners in there that Google was our friend, that they were never going to become a portal and that they would never steal anyone’s content.
Microsoft figured out that this was going to be a problem first -- you may recall that Bing was marketed as providing answers instead of results, which was a nascent threat. Google moved towards providing answers, and found that embedding ads / product placement in those answers was profitable.
Also remember that the users of Google in 2002 or whenever were a different audience. The "win-win" for you is confusion to the average punter.
I don't want to come off as a defender of Google -- but search is an incredibly complex business that means something different to many cohorts of users. I think the surveillance stuff is approaching or crossing a line nowadays, but I think it's fair to say they have done a pretty good job considering how the online and offline world has evolved.
I don't think so, and that s thanks to people who keep writing blogs, tutorials, make thoughtful videos, posting thoughtful comments etc. The "Old web" had a high technical barrier to entry and that acted as a selection filter. The "new web" is the former TV audience, which moved to facebook/instagram and mobile apps. It's big audience, and marketers are after it, but that didnt make the "old web" disappear. I ve never read anything interesting inside facebook except from Yann Lecun's posts (which he keeps there out of courtesy to his employer).
I just hope people stop thinking the old web should also move inside those because that's where their crowd is. It's not true, that's a different crowd.