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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you feel about Google's actions, there's no need to concoct elaborate stories around and speculative theories about the origin of Google's 'don't be evil' slogan. You can look it up.

According to http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html, the 'don't be evil' slogan came from Paul Buchheit, who was brand-new to the company when he proposed it at a corporate-values brainstorming meeting. This meeting was before Google became an advertising company, and Paul intended the slogan to be funny, and a jab at other companies.

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It's also worth noting that Paul Buchheit worked at Intel before Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit and I remember him railing about big companies and the sort of sclerotic bureaucracy that prevailed at big companies.

I think Paul also wanted to pick an idea that would prevent Google from becoming a typical big company. But I don't recall there ever being any sort of "Google's strategy leans it toward evil; we need to avoid that" undertone in Paul's suggestion. In my mind, it was more like "avoid how almost all larger companies naturally end up being."

Now it appears Google is one of those almost all companies.

I agree with the parent commenter: the fact that "don't be evil" was adopted suggests strongly that there is a motivation to be evil that needed to be overcome (and that users could identify with).

The company storytelling that goes along with the slogan doesn't matter, and nor does it matter that it's intended mainly as a jab at competitors in the same industry.

Any company, person or organization has the potential to be evil. That's a truism that doesn't bring any value to the conversation.

It's not a 0-1 thing, there are degrees of attraction towards "evil". The guard in a concentration camp has more tendency towards evil than the guard in, say, a factory or residential building.

As Buchheit[1] himself said: "It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent." (emphasis mine)

Realizing that your competitors, i.e. firms you acknowledge as being in the same industry, are "kind of exploiting the users" seems to me not far from realizing that your very industry has a tendency towards that.

I think "Don't be evil" is an honest expression of the early confidence and idealism of the founders and core team of Google. However, in the last few years, as with America at large, something seems to have changed at Google. Personally, I tend to steer more and more away from it.

If they truly wanted to avoid evil and, perhaps more important, the potential for future evil, they would anonymize all observations to make, say, search per se better (as opposed to expressly attributing data so as to "personalize" it). That, incidentally, would also make Google immune to NSA bullying. Much like Apple, they could just say: We don't even store this kind of data, sorry guys, look somewhere else. At the rate with which they collect data points and with which hardware, algos, and science advance, it will be possible in a few years to do fine-grained psychological profiling on a massive scale, with all the possibilities of evil I can imagine. It's a fine line between prediction and control in social systems. And we all know that what is technically possible eventually will be tried by someone. It's not hard to think of scenarios.

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[1] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html

Limiting technology usage because of fear of unforeseen consequences seems a little short-sighted to me. If I would agree with such a line of thought, I would be Amish or something. In regards to evilness potential, the genie is out of the bottle ever since the Internet happened.

Btw, Google does personalize searches in a useful way. You may not have noticed it, especially if you're from the US. DuckDuckGo is unusable for me whenever I search for local stuff. Also, when I search for "Ruby", the first result is about Ruby, the programming language. Guess what my wife sees when she's doing the same search.

You can place "personalize" in quotes all you want, but they are doing it because users want it, period.

Also, I see people here being so enthused about DuckDuckGo, ignoring that the project itself uses Bing's APIs as its primary engine. Of course it does, who would be insane to recreate Google's infrastructure and algorithms when you could get it by piggybacking on Google's main competitor and without which DuckDuckGo wouldn't have been possible.

And here's what a lot of people miss - you don't even need a unique cookie to track users down. All you need are IPs and some smart algorithms for disambiguations. You can't reliably identify all users, but you can identify many of them only by keeping the history of searches per IP. And if you throw in a user agent (which I can assure you, it does get sent to Bing), the reliability increases even further. Throw in IPv6 and we won't be needing cookies at all.

If anything, fear of technology doesn't do any good, because it will happen, regardless if you want it or not. Privacy concerns need to be solved by laws. If governments disapprove, then we need new governments.

1. Region can be changed in DuckDuckGo's settings, for more localized results -- by default it is set to "No region," so there is nothing localized in the results.

2. Bing is one of very very many sources, which are all remixed and combined, so the end result is completely different from Bing or any other upstream source (and most often, far better).

3. No, no, no. Nothing at all is sent to bing other than a plain request for an ad coming from DuckDuckGo servers with the query (for a page-relevant ad). So, this sentence: "user agent (which I can assure you, it does get sent to Bing)" <-- Utterly untrue.

Now, when you click on an ad, naturally your information is sent to both bing and whatever site the ad was for. That's to be expected, you are leaving DuckDuckGo at that point. This is also true when you click standard result links, of course.

Now that that's out of the way, my personal opinion of result tailoring/bubbling is: it's good sometimes. I love being in my cozy little bubble when searching for coding things, and even local businesses and such. I do NOT love bubbling when I am doing academic research. Why would I want to see content I already know and like? That invalidates the point of research, and even gives me a false idea about whatever I am researching.

Bubbling and tracking, while good in some cases, should be optional in my opinion.

This is ahistorical. As another commenter said, you can look into the factual history behind the slogan yourself before it became an advertising company.[1]

[1]: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html

That's an anecdotal account, not a factual history. Besides, I can use it to make my point, e.g.:

"our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users"

So, they are fully aware that they're entering an industry where exploiting the users is a common temptation. Like I said, this provides motivation for a slogan referring to that.

"Amit started writing it down all over the building, on whiteboards everywhere."

Imagine literally going around plastering "Don't be evil" all over your colleagues' working spaces: I'm not sure that would be accepted as inoffensive in most work places... IMHO that would normally be a very strong action showing you think your colleagues ought to be reminded.

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