You have to have consumed quite a bit of the "Goolaid" to be able to take his ramblings seriously.
Genuinely curious here, what are the things that google has done that people think are evil? Maybe as a follow-up, what corporations do you think make a greater positive impact than google?
I already told you: "I'm hesitant to call anything evil just for being caught in the cross-hairs of the drug laws in the US." If you think that violating the drugs laws (or helping someone to do so) in the US is evil, then we have a fundamental disagreement.
From my reading of the article, the sting wasn't to find out if Google was knowingly helping scams---just that they were knowingly helping someone sell illegal drugs.
Yes, it was. The entire article is about setting up a sting to catch Google helping people sell illicit drugs.
> The problem was that they were fake.
I'm running out of ways to explain this to you: the sting showed no evidence that Google knew that the drugs were fake---only that they knew that they were trying to sell illegal drugs.
There are two competing ideas going on here:
1) Google knowingly facilitated the sale of illegal drugs.
2) Google knowingly facilitated scammers.
From what I could tell, the article demonstrated (1) but not (2). I don't think (1) is evil. I do think (2) is evil. So if you disagree with my interpretation of the article, at least you can be satisfied that we agree on something.
We should all understand that google doesn't deserve relentless praise, but some of these counterpoints are more baseless and distasteful.
Did MapQuest change the world?
Did AltaVista or Yahoo!?
What about the thousand translation sites that exited before Google?
I'll tell you who is changing the world. SpaceX. It is led by a man who started it despite all odds. A man whose sole drive is to get humanity to Mars so that if something happens to Earth, it doesn't wipe out our entire species. A man who believes he has a mission, and believes in that mission so strongly that he is willing to invest every last penny of his personal fortune in it, and work himself to death to see it accomplished.
THAT is changing the world. Not being able to look at pictures of a street from your computer or find the translation of a spoken phrase accurately or make payments via your email - all the while being served shitty, mostly useless ads.
I'm sorry, I love Google and the convenience it provides, but at the end of the day, it is just an advertising company. And you cannot change the world with advertising.
We don't have the tech yet. But it is getting there. Being able to find the translation of a spoken phrase, or answer a spoken question accurately is actually difficult. You pretty much need your phone to be aware of the environment; if you want to get good results that is. So projects like Siri, Google Now or Glass are actually important and potentially can be crucial and 'world changing'.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that every world-changing problem is difficult to solve, but not every difficult problem is world-changing when solved. I have no doubt that Google engineers overcame countless challenges that would fry the brains of most people here. Does that mean the solutions they produced changed the world? No. Rather, they ended up as products and features in Google's massive advertising machine.
You mentioned other projects. Let's take Google Glass. It is quite promising. But let's face it: at the end of the day, it will be yet another means of showing people ads. They will be more accurate ads perhaps, since Google will know exactly where you are and what you are looking at - but they will still be ads.
| he is willing to invest every last penny
Those examples "changed the world" in the same way the iPod and iPhone changed the world: extremely elegant implementations of products and ideas that had been out there already.
Sometimes getting the details right -- turning a curiosity for the rich into a tool for the masses -- really is a key advance worthy of its own recognition.
In any case, my point wasn't that the analogy is particularly apt in this specific case. It was that extending "what has been done" to "what works for people", in general, is a noteworthy accomplishment in and of itself.
So while one can certainly still argue that Google hadn't 'changed the world', they ought not simply point to the prior existence of alternatives. They would also need to show that it didn't unleash untapped demand/usage.
And the snarky, though not entirely-irrelevant, reply to altavista's peak usage is: 13 million queries? Sounds a million people had to search about a dozen times each to get a decent hit.
| Bing Maps