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> where Google is at heart an intelligence agency with occult motives That seems off to me. Google is, at heart, an advertiser. This leads to Amazon being more

by curun1r 10y ago

> where Google is at heart an intelligence agency with occult motives That seems off to me. Google is, at heart, an advertiser. This leads to Amazon being more customer centric because most Google customers are actually the product Google is selling and most Google "products" are just the lures they use to attract their actual product. Google never loses interest in their products, but they frequently choose to switch their method of attracting the eyeballs they sell. No cloak and dagger explanations needed.

straightforward 10y ago
Google BECAME an advertiser. Some of us remember the pre-advertising, and later pre-Doubleclick-acquisition Google. I'm not implying Google's motives are "cloak and dagger," just that they are not transparent beyond "index all the world's knowledge" (with all that implies.) This is the mission it started with, which isn't in and of itself a complete business model. It's the model of an intelligence agency, and that's what I meant by my statement. Right now, advertising brings in the money, but it'd be a breathtaking failure of imagination and intellect for that to be the "best and highest use" of Google's corpus. An optimist would say "advertising subsidized google's mission which is essentially one of public service." A pessimist would say "who knows WHAT google will do (or may already be doing) with what it knows - but it's probably evil." I'm neither, valuing the services Google provides while distrusting the power it has based on its data and reach.
justicezyx 10y ago
Ads is the business. You need the tech to build it. And Gooogle is not an AI company. Google is definitely more of a computing company than anything else. DeepMind will not reach its current stage without Google's computing capability, and Google's computing capability is literally no where else to be found. Disclaimer: I work at Google.
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by curun1r 10y ago

straightforward 10y ago

Google BECAME an advertiser. Some of us remember the pre-advertising, and later pre-Doubleclick-acquisition Google. I'm not implying Google's motives are "cloak and dagger," just that they are not transparent beyond "index all the world's knowledge" (with all that implies.) This is the mission it started with, which isn't in and of itself a complete business model. It's the model of an intelligence agency, and that's what I meant by my statement. Right now, advertising brings in the money, but it'd be a breathtaking failure of imagination and intellect for that to be the "best and highest use" of Google's corpus. An optimist would say "advertising subsidized google's mission which is essentially one of public service." A pessimist would say "who knows WHAT google will do (or may already be doing) with what it knows - but it's probably evil." I'm neither, valuing the services Google provides while distrusting the power it has based on its data and reach.

justicezyx 10y ago

Ads is the business. You need the tech to build it. And Gooogle is not an AI company. Google is definitely more of a computing company than anything else. DeepMind will not reach its current stage without Google's computing capability, and Google's computing capability is literally no where else to be found. Disclaimer: I work at Google.

deleted 10y ago
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