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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan episode was obviously one rogue branch with insufficient oversight; as soon as the guys in Mountain View found out what was going on, they stopped it, and with a minimum of the sort of corporate doublespeak you'd expect from most big companies. The changes to privacy policies are the sort of thing hackers love to gripe about, but don't actually matter much. (How many HN readers are going to stop using Google because of them, for example?) All it really boils down to is that he's mad because his friend got cut off by Adsense. And it is uncool the way Google just blows people off like that, but it's not new. They've always been that way. So if you didn't hate Google 5 years ago, this post offers no reason to hate them now.

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When a single company has a record of almost everything I do online I have to hold them to a much higher standard than other companies. Arguments about Google's intentions tend to swing to the emotional because the nature of their business requires that we trust them indefinitely. And the way they've handled a handful of these issues recently signals to me that they're feeling more and more comfortable straining that trust if it suits their agenda.

So the increasing frequency of these posts is, I think, barometer of the growing, gut-feeling discomfort among the geek community.

Arguably, it's also a barometer of Google's increasing status as the primary corporate enemy of Apple Computer, Inc. My gut tells me that if someone actually did the survey they'd find that "Google is Evil" posts and upvotes correlate less with Civil Libertarian politics than they do with the manufacturer of the poster's phone and laptop.

That seems to be an odd 'gut reaction'.

Is it not possible for someone to be an Apple/iOS or $Manufacturer/Android user and have their own opinions about _anything_ without it somehow being either labeled as fanboyism or anti-fanboyism?

I am tired of this false dilemma.

From my 19 years of experience on the internet watching platform flame after platform flame (yes, OS/2 was clearly superior to NT 3.1!): No. No it is not.

Clear principled opinions are wonderful things. Some people have them. Most, sadly, do not. Virtually everyone, however, cheers for some team or another. Lacking other arguments, these people will cleave to whatever argument of principle they find in front of them. Thus: Google is Evil.

Well, I haven't noticed that but I'm not out there in CA or an iPhone or a Mac user. The alleged Google/Apple hiring blacklist conspiracy seemed to cast them both in a pretty awful light.

But the plural of "gut feeling" is not "data", it's...hmmm.

The no poaching agreements also included Adobe, Intuit and Intel.

I find myself agreeing with the last sentence. Gut reaction, but it seems to be a "something doesn't smell right" moment for Google.

(Whether or not such reaction belongs on HN? I don't know; for all the rational thinking in this group, intuition still seems to play a pretty strong role.)

Arguments about Google's intentions tend to swing to the emotional because the nature of their business requires that we trust them indefinitely.

Actually, you only have to trust them for 9 months after you decide to stop using Google:

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/

When does Bing or Yahoo anonymize your search data? When does Joe's Random ISP delete your email from all their tape backups after you cancel your account? Google is being honest and open about what they do; other companies hope you don't realize you should care.

It's a personal story of when someone stopped believing Google, not a deep analyses of why Google is "evil".

For me Google stopped being credible when it did a 180 on net neutrality. There were good reasons before that, and there were certainly good reasons after that, but when someone or some company loses the benefit of the doubt is a personal thing.

What currently pisses me off most about Google is their blatant disregard for privacy, more specifically their open and arrogant disdain for the way privacy is perceived (and protected by law) outside the US.

In hindsight I "should" have started "hating" Google much earlier, and OMG, I still use Google. Doesn't make any single individual argument criticizing Google any less valid though.

But most of all, the value in this post does not lie in his arguments, but in the fact that it illustrates the way in which Google is losing its supporters and its credibility as an ethical corporation.

In my humble opinion, and I apologize to any Facebook engineers who read this, but Facebook has touched off an ethical race to the bottom with regards to users, their privacy, and their information that can be sold to advertisers.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but it's too bad nonetheless.

Facebook was always in the game of collecting private data and exploiting it. It's in the nature of their product, you pretty much sign up for that up front.

Google offered services that didn't explicitly require users to register personal data (with some exceptions, like Orkut), and only much later started collating and exploiting all the information they gathered by observing.

The latter is much creepier. It's the difference between someone asking you to fill out a form with very personal information and someone who's spying on you through binoculars.

Also, Google betrayed people's trust with their whole "don't be evil" thing. Most people never trusted Facebook very much to begin with. Many of us trusted Google. Betrayal pisses people off more than just being screwed.

Pretty much every company does this. Your phone company keeps a list of all people you call. (And happily give that list to anyone that asks nicely.) They collect information from your phone about dropped calls and keystrokes. Retail stores move stuff around and see if it changes your buying habits. Grocery stores track every item you buy and then have targeted ads print on your receipt. Amazon changes the price you see based on some profile it has built on you. Google does nothing worse than any of these companies -- when you have users, you accumulate user data. You can just leave it lying around for the government to collect, or you can fold it into your product to make it better. Google uses it to make their products better, and they have written policies on when the data gets anonymized and when the data gets discarded completely. Does your phone company or grocery store do that?

Furthermore, Google is one of the few companies that actively tries to educate you on how they care about your privacy. There are ads in the subway. There are ads on TV. There are ads (right now) on the top of every Google property. They really want their processes to be transparent so that you know what you're signing up for when you use Google products. It seems irrational to hate Google when every other Internet company is collecting the same data that Google is, but they hide their policies it behind 300 pages of legalese and Google buys ads to make it easier for you to understand.

I think there has to be some deeper issue than "they changed their privacy policy" or "my friends' pictures show up on the results page" that is causing all the Google hate. Because it just isn't justified for the privacy policy change or Search Plus Your World.

@jrockway - I know you just started at Google. Anyway, here are the deeper issues.

1. I had mentioned this in another post to you before. Anyway, some people(not all) are upset because your company said you were better than everyone else. "You can make money without being evil" "What is the best for users?" All that crap Google said to us and continues to say like it still exists. Google was the poster child of the business of the future. Everyone felt you were the ones that were actually going to do good. Facebook/MS/Apple never posed as is this. You did. And that is where the anger comes in. When you are told one thing and the opposite happens people get mad. They should have tried to manage expectations.

2. Thousands of businesses depend on your search engine. With some of them 80% of their business comes from you whether thru paid ads or not. Many of these companies never would have built their websites if Google didn't exist. When your company changes things to place their irrelevant content over the content of other websites/companies people are going to be pissed. What if Apple created their own applications for 50% of the categories in the app store and then placed their apps at the top of each category? Wouldn't you expect some sort of anger? Do you think Zynga would be pissed if Facebook placed all of their games higher than Zynga's games? Its the same thing.

When you are told one thing and the opposite happens people get mad.

What is so evil about adding social networking features to everyone's account? You have a Docs account and a Picasa account too, even if you don't use them, and nobody complains about that. What's the difference between Docs and Google+?

Thousands of businesses depend on your search engine.

This I understand. People are upset that they have to play with us even though they don't want to. Nobody likes to do things that they're forced to do. But this seems like shooting the messenger; it's not Google being evil because users won't use any search engines other than Google. That's just loyalty to a pretty nice product.

Google's customers are the people that click on search results. So while re-ranking your site may kill your business, you're not a user and that re-ranking makes the experience better for our users. If the social cues that Google now adds are truly irrelevant as you say, they shouldn't affect users' behavior at all. Users are not going to stop searching for something to buy just because they have to scroll the results page. If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. And that's a good thing, even if individual pages get less traffic from Google. Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large.

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn't be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you're selling, and, generally, be a "good match" for what the user wants.

What if Apple created their own applications for 50% of the categories in the app store and then placed their apps at the top of each category?

They already do this. Apple's apps are included for free on every phone. And you aren't allowed to replicate their functionality, either. It's expectee. Apple makes phones, Apple gets to put whatever they want on the phones. Google makes search engine results pages, Google gets to put whatever they want on search engine results pages.

This isn't quite the right analogy, though. I can see why MapQuest would be upset about Google Maps and why Yelp would be upset about Google Local. But even in those cases, Google ranks things as you'd expect. Yelp results often appear over the Google business pages, because Yelp is more popular for reviews. So overall, I don't see Google as being evil. They're being competitive and they make good products.

"Google makes search engine results pages, Google gets to put whatever they want on search engine results pages."

- Are you sure you've read the ten commandments? If you haven't here's the link. http://www.google.com/about/company/tenthings.html

In case you don't get the time to visit the link, let me include the very first paragraph of the very first commandment; it goes something like this

"Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line."

Since people are taking what I've said out of context, I thought I'd clarify this statement:

It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads

I shouldn't have mentioned ads here. Position on the results page should only depend on the quality of your content; if your site has the best content on the Internet for the user's search terms, you should be the top result. You shouldn't be able to change your position in the organic results any other way, like by exploiting bugs in Google's ranking algorithm. The specifics of the ranking algorithm may change, but if your site is the best, you won't have to worry about it.

So how would you explain the Google+ profile ranking for a query like "Mark Zuckerberg". Is that really the "best content" on the web for that query?

Most likely lots of your friends have added him, so he shows up highly as he is popular (though for ironic reasons) member of a site you are a member of.

wait... "What if Apple created their own applications for 50% of the categories in the app store and then placed their apps at the top of each category?"

So ummm none of Google own products are featured at the top of each search category? Most of the time this is not a good user experience but users and businesses have no real option!

I buried this in the post, but of all the things Google's done this month the promotion of Google Search Plus Your World (aka Search+) is what concerns me the most. The other negative stories are less significant, I only mentioned them because they're part of the trend I'm feeling.

I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.

I agree that's the most worrying sign. In the past Google won by making what people needed. But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook. That hasn't made Google evil yet. It's just the first step down the road to mediocrity. Which may lead to evil in the long term, because to make lots of money despite being mediocre, you generally have to do evil things.

I don't think it's that interesting that anti-Google posts get reflexively upvoted though. The cause is one of the more common and least discriminating aspects of human nature: whenever any person or organization is successful, there are a lot of people who want to see them cut down to size.

I think the last year has been fairly tough on Google (ever since Page took over). It's been the first real time that Google has put a concerted effort into

a)making money outside of pure search ads

b)cutting expenses

It's this sudden turn into becoming a real company that has shocked and angered lots of people and burned up most of the good will capital they accrued till then.

As painful as it is for us freeloaders, this might be a good thing for Google as a company that will help ensure long-term viability and growth.

It echoes Bezos's push into uniforming the architecture inside of Amazon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102800

Painful, but may ultimately be necessary. Google's far too long been the place of half-finished ideas.

It's this sudden turn into becoming a real company that has shocked and angered lots of people and burned up most of the good will capital they accrued till then.

If being a "real" company means only thinking about profits, well, then it is only fair that you lose the goodwill capital that you accrued by not only thinking about profits if you stop doing that. Is this the case with Google? For me the jury is still out, but it is undeniable that my OnyProfitsCountRank(tm) algorithm is getting a lot of signals that Google might be trailing the lots of Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

I'm genuinely curious: Why the downvotes? Possible reasons:

A) Because I wrote that If being a "real" company means only thinking about profits, well, then it is only fair that you lose the goodwill capital that you accrued by not only thinking about profits if you stop doing that

B) Because I wrote that it is undeniable that my OnyProfitsCountRank(tm) algorithm is getting a lot of signals that Google might be trailing the lots of Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

C) Both

SPYW certainly seems like the only real, new issue. It seems to me like a clear case of sacrificing a product's short-term quality for long-term quality. I.e. diverting as much traffic as possible to G+ will drive up usage, which will give Google more data on which to optimize search results.

It strikes me as analogous to Apple's move from OS9 to OSX. OSX performed poorly at first, but it was a necessary if painful infrastructure change for the sake of the product's future.

Another reason I'm not worried is that Google's only lock-in is search quality. If a challenger appears and really does perform better for searches, then people will eventually shift over. I think this is ultimately what will keep Google from going completely off the rails vis-a-vis search.

Conversely, I think it's what allows Facebook to get away with a lot. Its lock-in feature is ubiquity/network-effect, which is at best orthogonal to quality of product.

> whenever

Why doesn't it happen to Apple, then? Apple is much much more successful than Google, and, arguably, more "evil".

What I think people react badly to, is hypocrisy (real or perceived). Apple does what it says and doesn't apologize. Google has this whole blurry theory of "not being evil" which many of its own actions prove false, hence the backlash.

Also, at least at the moment, Apple's profit model is easy to understand - you pay money, receive something in return and they pocket the profit. Google's model is based upon understanding who you are so they can place the best adverts in front of you. When you're an upstart, that "who you are" bit doesn't seem to matter too much, when you're a behemoth, it becomes pretty scary.

Apple is not responsible for large chunks of Internet infrastructure, such as search, advertisements, email, maps, analytics, and many other services that are automatic "go-to" solutions for hundreds of millions of users of Google services. They just want to sell you an overpriced phone/table/laptop (God I can't believe I just defended Apple!).

They do increasingly dominate the online music business with iTunes, much in the same way that Amazon does with digital books, but that is nothing compared to the global Internet reach of Google and hence a higher level of responsibility and scrutiny.

"High trees catch lots of wind" (Dutch proverb)

"it" manifests itself differently for Apple. Apple, not being in the content hosting as much as Google, gets attacked on its environmental (Greenpeace) and its social (Foxconn reports) stances, not necessarily because it is behaving badly relative to its peers, but also because it is a more visible target.

I don't believe Google is intentionally being evil, but they are definitely behaving a lot like the company they coined the phrase because of.

In the 90s Microsoft was using it's huge installed user base advantage to push it's less popular and new-to-the-game browser on a group of people, while also keeping out the competition with some unfair ways.

This seems identical to how Google is using it's position as leader of search to push it's late to the game and less popular social network onto it's users, while keeping out the competition.

Changing your search engine is easy. Changing your OS is not.

How about changing your webmail provider, your mobile OS and the cloud services integrated with it?

http://www.dataliberation.org/

I'm not saying Google is perfect, but they seem to take customer choice seriously. That's the exact opposite of Microsoft 10 years ago.

That's where the android strategy Is paying

That Verizon can change the default search engine to Bing? Let's see a Windows Phone phone ship with Google as the default search engine...

Another common aspect of human nature: Interpreting people in the worst possible way.

My opinion of Google has turned from positive to negative in the last 5 years, and it has nothing to do with how big or successful they are.

Google has been very successful for years. They've only been losing their high esteem in the last year or less. At least in my social circle.

>But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook.

This is my main issue with Google. Most of their products/services were created/acquired not because they want to innovate or create something awesome. it's usually to copy or kill newer and more innovative start-ups and products or more established companies (many of Google's services are mediocre versions given away for free).

Case in point: Yelp, Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Skyhook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.

I'd say Search Plus Your World is a cause for concern, but not for the reasons most people think. I'd say SPYW isn't evil, it is an admission of failure. In particular, I think it is an admission that Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul.

> Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul

Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results.

My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else.

I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means.

My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.

Regarding your last line: reading some of the anti-Google stories going around (e.g. anything John Gruber or MG Siegler produce) actually made me stop and think whether I needed to go back and re-evaluate Microsoft as I may have just been swept along by the Apple cult attacking its strongest perceived competitors.

>I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.

Ten years ago? How about now? The hate for Microsoft around here is so bad that winsupersite.com (the premier inside and latest Microsoft related news site) is completely banned from even submitting to HN, probably because of excessive flagging by haters [1]. Google hate is nothing compared to that.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883

Observe the cognitive dissonance of people accusing Google of Big Company Badness and then going on to recommend Bing in the same breath.

One reason for which I don't like Google anymore is that they broke their primary promise, which they were emphasizing more and more around 2004-2005 (if I remember correctly): to make most of the world's information easily accessible and shareable, and, why not?, trying to make a difference in this world.

In my ideal world the Wikileaks info would have lived in a Google sub-domain, climate change discussions would have been based on open charts and data which would have been also hosted by Google (with available info going back since the first meteorological observations were made), mashups about Iraq and Afghanistan wars with geo-located user-uploaded photos could have lived at maps.google.com/war and so on and so on.

I know that what I was dreaming about doesn't add any stock-market value or anything (and in the worst case scenario it gets you straight into jail), but that's at least what I call "changing the world, trying to make it a better place", like guys such as Diderot or d'Alembert did three centuries ago.

Don't stop dreaming.

I upvoted this post not because it really brings anything new to the list of grievances against Google, but because I feel its important that the existing grievances not be forgotten.

Also, this is one of the few places on the web where I am sure people from Google frequent. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and naive, but if highlighting posts like these help to shift Google back even just a little towards "Don't be evil" then it was worth my upvote.

I think there is a lot of "hate" for Google these days, but I believe every bodies reasoning is different. This is OK, they have alienated so many of their users, but many in a different way. My current "hate" for google stems from them taking the social away from Google reader,I don't give two Sh!t$ about the policies being merged, I actually think that's a good thing. Someone else "hates" the new social merged into search. Honestly, I enjoy diversity in the services I use online. I want my music to be independent from my email to be independent from my "social network" (not to be confused with my "personal network", of which, email is a part of) I don't like what google has become, and if I wasn't firmly planted and reliant on gmail, I'd be google product free. RSS, search, and cloud storage are all now solved for me elsewhere, and social always has been. I'm sticking with gmail, because I'm not anti-google, and it's a fantastic product, but I've left google products because somethign better came along (dropbox killed any need for google docs, google killed their RSS as far as I'm concerned, and G+ never really did it for me (or any of my actual friends, although I've got thousands of followers, they're all from the HN circle...) Did I mention that I revel in diversity to keep my mind engaged and learning new things. I don't want my entire experience to be from google or facebooks window, I want wide open spaces of internet and applications. If you know what I mean.

This is going to turn into a larger rant on the the course of "social media" and their networks. When I'm with certain groups of friends, I act and talk in a certain way, and by no means should some of that ever be public. I want to talk and communicate with some of the social group of mine online, but in no way shape or form should any of that be public as well. Many people can't make that distinction (hence the UK people being deported because of tweets) and I think the big companies are trying to ruin that divide between public and private.

Agreed. I was expecting to see him mention the no-employee-poaching collusion between Google, Apple, Intuit, etc. That is something that has drastically changed my opinion of Google recently. The other stuff he mentioned, not so much.

I found something more interesting in his post: that Google has maybe been regarded still as a startup, even though they are far, far from it. "Don't be evil" seems like a motto that would guide a startup; it's hard for me to imagine any company of Google's size and position seriously trying to follow such a screed.

The end of his post is perfectly salient: let's reserve our enthusiasm and defesnes and cheerleading for actual startups, which no longer include Google.

Well I think a lot of where Google crosses the line is becoming clearer now. For example, personalized ads in gmail. Try to opt-out of personalized ads in gmail, seriously go and try it.

You can click the button, but they won't actually opt you out. At least not how you'd expect. You'll still get personalized ads, but they just use a different heuristic for how to personalize (based on the current email).

How hard is it to not personalize my ads at all? It would be easy. But Google has opted to add value to advertisers over their users.

This alone is one reason why I'm thinking of leaving gmail. Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.

This has been a core facet of gmail for years. You get free email + storage - they post contextual ads on the right.

The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms.

>> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.

Yeah... sure

I'm talking about something else. I'm talking specifically about the "option" of opting out of personalized (and there is a well hidden option that Google has for this), but it only changes the algorithm. You still get personalized ads.

When I signed up for GMail when it first opened, this was not the case.

>> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.

Yeah... sure

Is this hard to believe? I just created a hotmail account. I need to try it on all my devices first. And then of course get my forwarding accounts switched to it. If all goes well I'll switch. The main concern is lack of imap so I'll use Exchange ActiveSync -- but since I don't generally use that today, I need to make sure it works fine.

But there was a time when GMail was untouchable. Now its a service I can't wait to get off of.

Hence the need for honeypots, pg. :)

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