4 ms·
>Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it. Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied
by hueving 8y ago
>Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.
Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied positive correlation with with ethics.
On the contrary, you can easily become very competitive by giving up on ethics (see Volkswagen diesels for example). So the best search product might belong to Google but that hardly implies its an ethical company.
- eloff 8y agoTrue. However, the argument that advertising in search results is unethical seems weak, I don't see it. There is some conflict of interest, but Google walks the line pretty well. I don't think it necessarily follows that a conflict of interest mandates unethical behavior. I correct my stance to be that the trade-off of having better search quality in exchange for ads in the search results and the associated tracking is still worth it to me. If I felt otherwise I would use a more privacy friendly search engine.