Google: Evil or Righteous?

I'm often fascinated by Google.

I lived in Mountain View, CA from 1997-1999 on Tyrella Ave., near Middlefield Road and Moffett Ave.

The big dog on the block at that time was Netscape Communications, which owned several buildings near the 21st Point Fitness Center on Middlefield Ave., which I was a member of.

Google started in 1998, somewhere close to where I lived in Palo Alto, CA from what I understand, by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The technology they created was absolutely necessary at the time: a search engine for content on the internet. At the time Google started, the 3 most popular search engines on the internet were Infoseek, Yahoo! and Excite. Infoseek was a really good search engine, the other 2 (Yahoo! and Excite) were garbage, for the most part useless (especially Excite).

Luckily for Google, Infoseek was purchased by Go.com which was owned by Disney. Disney quickly made stupid decisions and Infoseek was deprecated, called Go.com and buried amongst Disneys various websites. From the moment Disney purchased it, it was doomed. So all of the great work from the Infoseek engineers - the search algorythm, was lost due to brand marketing and incompentent idiots who were running Infoseek after being purchased by Disney.

Yahoo! was OK for a website, but was really useful as a site to go for web links to other sites. Their search was tool was weak at that time.

Excite was just a 3rd-rate useless tool that you went to as a last resort. Excite was started by a bunch a people who thought that they were alot smarter than they actually were. But luckily for them they got their site out there a little bit ahead of the curve, and alot of people threw money at them not knowing that they would eventually lose it due to the uselessness of Excite and it's technology. It was basically a copy site, inferior to Infoseek and even Yahoo!

So in 1999, most people were fed up trying to search for stuff on the internet, and here comes Google with a great little search engine. I loved Google Search and still do. I can find what is most relevant to me at any given time. Their search algorythm works.

They got big, went public, stock soared, they all got rich and then something predictable happened: most of them became arrogant assholes.

It's very understandable. Put people together that believe they are better than the rest of us in the world and you get what Google is today: a company mostly full of rich, arrogant people.

Why do I say this? I mean, doesn't Google own the very site that I am blogging from?

Of course they do.

Google has a motto: Don't be evil.

But for the many ways that Google has improved technology and our lives from offering free products and services on the internet, they have also displayed the sort of "evil" behavior that they so publicly disdain from their main competitor, Microsoft.

A couple of years ago, Google tried to publish every single book in print to the internet without getting the permission of the content rights holders: the publishing companies and the authors. Nice going. They stormed into public libraries and started copying everything they could.

Now Google is making it such that you can see at street level at any place at any given time. Cool technology, no doubt. But did Google ever think about privacy concerns? Of course not.

Another thing I particularly hate is how they recruit new new employees: Solve some riddle at some random billboard location in the Bay Area and then solve another brain teaser from a newspaper advertisement. The whole strategy is to recruit the so-called "smart people". Well, I know a bunch of those people who couldn't carry my jockstrap when it comes to software design and implementation. People that get into Google are smart, no doubt.

Keep an eye on what Google is doing. They are increasingly deciding their own rules. In 10 years, they might be the hated company that Microsoft is today.