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The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. S

The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil". All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
This. I think the belief that Google wasn't evil and is losing its way come from people not wanting to accept they'd been duped. The company was always evil. It was always built around selling your attention to advertisers who want you to buy things. And ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results. As ad blockers have become popular and the demand for continual growth has remained steady, the costs they accepted to hide their evil were the first expense to get cut.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  I think it's worse than that. I think "Don't be evil" implied that the company sought to avoid taking its highly-trained technical talent and applying them to the job of, say, weapons systems. In that sense, they weren't evil; attention shifting isn't nearly as bad as drone targeting. ... but if the money isn't there in ads in the future, I don't expect the company to just curl up and die. It'll be interesting to see what comes next when "The smartest people" need to find something to do.
  - bjornjaja 7y ago
    Smart people gravitate to AI like a magnet. Or completely tangential things like starting a bakery, restaurant, etc. We’re all going to be left in a Wall-E universe though unless they help fight climate change.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      I think you're right on the AI, and I think Google agrees. https://ai.google/ https://ai.google/ Problem is, while there's certainly money in applications of AI (the ad auction is one of them), it's unclear that "AI" as a discipline is a money-factory like ads is. Google's looking for a money factory to replace ads because they're worried about that revenue stream being fragile (for the reasons ocdtrekkie highlighted).
    - Filligree 7y ago
      Fight climate change? How? "The smart people" provided a recipe for preventing/fixing climate change several decades ago. The politicians have never gone along, and now it's pretty much too late. It's no use hoping for a magic technical solution -- the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission".
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        "the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission"." Why? Internalizing externalities with a tax only works if the actual correct amount of those externalities equals or exceeds the amount that would reduce demand for fuel enough to stop climate change. This is a huge assumption that I never see anyone even acknowledge needs to be demonstrated. I think in fact they are far less, but my point is that debating that would be a red herring, since people seem to talk of externalities while never even believing in the concept, and that tension needs to be resolved. The externalities are a number that in principle has a correct value, and the increase in price to change behavior sufficiently to stop warming is another number that independently has a certain value. But you have to have a logical reason for thinking they match if you think internalizing the costs is a solution.
      - bjornjaja 7y ago
  - mjparrott 7y ago
    I'd say creating the surveillance state is on par with weapons systems, drones, etc. The fact that every American is spied on (I know they accepted the T&Cs) and has zero privacy anymore is not "don't be evil".
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Not if the people actually ask for it. Adoption shows people want the features the "surveillance state" empowers. A definition that calls that evil also calls auto manufacturers evil because of the car accident rate.
  - JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
    Sure; In the same way that a pediatrician would have the slogan "Don't diddle kids." If you need a slogan like that, there is already a problem. Eventually, as we saw, they couldn't help themselves -- Maybe just one little oppression platform wouldn't be such a big deal...
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true. Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results. And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't. You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.
  - the_duke 7y ago
    > always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads I would not call a tiny label saying "Ad", with the same color as the text right next to it, a clear distinction. When using a browser without an ad blocker, I often click on ads by accident. It's very far from the clearly distinguishable background that ads used to have, and designed to be easily overlooked.
  - givinguflac 7y ago
    Google literally sells the top spots on results pages to advertisers. Come on. A little notation many will ignore doesn’t make it not a sale of the top spot.
  - shantly 7y ago
    > And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't. They do exactly that on mobile, and if you watch non-geeks use Google they cannot reliably spot the ad versus the "natural" results. Hell, I tap the ad about half the time, because I'm in a hurry and don't look closely enough, and they've extorted the owner of whatever company I'm searching for to pay for their own name so the top result is an ad for the thing I obviously wanted to find anyway.
shadowgovt 7y ago
While it's made them financially successful, it is in some sense a bit depressing that the company has spent years casting about for an economic engine that will generate revenue as efficiently as ads and nothing has been found. One could ask for better of the world, but the world does not deliver. "People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.
- kareemm 7y ago
  > People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine. It’s the scarcest resource we all have. Makes sense that mining it is so valuable.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
Nobody in any of these articles complains about ads, so that is nonsense. They complain about becoming like Apple and handing over unrestricted access to data to the Chinese government or about becoming like Palantir. They also complain about bigwigs being protected after harassing lower level workers. Those things, and the no-poach agreement Google entered with Steve Jobs, are evil.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  People expect ad-tech companies to be evil; once you've sold your soul once the second time it's a lot cheaper.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary. Once upon a time, Google was the most admired, brilliant company on the net and doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates. Then Google bought doubleclick...
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary. You agree then that GGP's assertion doesn't fit the data. > doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates I'm willing to bet your company uses that ad-tech. The reason I dislike Google is for all the actually evil things it has done. Its implementation of ad-tech doesn't pass the evil bar.
matz1 7y ago
What dishonest about "Don't be evil" ? The definition of evil is relative and subjective. Lets say building weapons systems to suppress dissident, is it evil ? It depends on who do you ask.
- npongratz 7y ago
  Sure, that's cool. Then I can also redefine words, sometimes retroactively and perhaps in contradiction to reason and rationality, as I see fit, to match whatever I subjectively feel is in my best interests.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Are you saying evil is not subjective ? What is your reason and rationality ?
    - zepto 7y ago
      Pain is subjective too, but it's reasonable to say that being poked in the eye it's painful.
      - matz1 7y ago
        Sure, its painful to you, but there may exist some people who will describe it as pleasure instead of pain.
        zepto 7y ago
        I’m sure there are, but it would be stupid to say as a result that in general it’s not painful.
rainyMammoth 7y ago
you described this better than I would ever have. I also always thought that the whole "Google got the best engineers in the world" was the best marketing campaign ever. Reinforced by all those people amazed by the stupid Google interview questions (how many ping pong ball in a 747?). It's amazing that all those engineers thinking of themselves as best in the world managed to get duped so easily by a marketing scheme.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  That's interesting. Google certainly did pick up a number of world class engineers from Microsoft and Bell Labs (Ken Thompson!). I wonder though if it was a conscious strategy to get these top-level engineers in order to retain a vast pool of average-level engineers by inflating their egos with the positive association.
GoodDreams 7y ago
Speaking of shame: Many people in the Bay Area blame tech workers for their woes. A friend of mine, an engineer at Google, also believes this and feels much shame. If they can focus on what others are doing wrong it makes them feel a little better.
- ex_ex_nihilo 7y ago
  A couple of years ago I was walking around downtown SF, and I noticed someone had drawn a chalk outline on the sidewalk and labeled it "techie fuck". I had a good chuckle. We are not loved there.
  - lukifer 7y ago
    The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian. Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/ https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/
rapind 7y ago
I see this as obvious. We should always expect a company to gravitate to whatever policies generate the most revenue and fight off the competition. Anything else is a Disney fairytale. In Google's case I think they were playing the long game and the "do no evil" mantra wasn't disingenuous, but they still need to compete. /shrug Eventually this is all going to get regulated, and the real story is how incredibly long it is taking to implement that regulation.
duckkg5 7y ago
Wow, you nailed it. The culture was easily the #1 reason IMO that Google kept getting getting on top of the top places to work lists. No other company could do it such a that scale - transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week. And no one there really, truly actually appreciates the fact that the entire empire is built on digital ads. Yes it's known, but it's not appreciated. It's just kind of understood that the business org sells ads so the rest of the company can work on other things, almost none of which make money and are largely built to squeeze out competitors in a given space that they can't or won't acquire. It's no longer a place I'd ever want to work again and hasn't been for years.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  There's a scale here for "evil" and it seems this discussion is sloppily equating all evil as the same. But it's mostly subjective. They also serve meat (including veal) in the cafes. Some find that pretty bad. Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons. Is weapons research evil? Hurts people in new ways, also can deter violence and defend from bad guys. But, can we say without hesitation that it's just as evil as helping ICE break up families, or helping Chinese censorship? People joined Google knowing about the ads (and the meat) but didn't expect other stuff they're seeing now. And that's perfectly reasonable. Few firms (any?) pass every possible "not evil test," so let's strengthen the quality of the debate here by avoiding logical sloppiness that would invalidate the important questions being discussed.
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    >Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons. It's entirely possible to run ads based on what might be of interest to someone reading that particular content without spying on users. It's just not as profitable.
john_moscow 7y ago
Oh, their recent way to make money with hotel/flight bookings, restaurant reviews, etc is even scarier. They essentially use their search engine market domination to find out who else makes money off the biggest searches, and then clone those products and show the clones on top of the originals. Good luck competing with that...
- shdh 7y ago
  Wouldn’t doing the same thing be feasible to anyone with access to Google Trends?
  - john_moscow 7y ago
    You mean, placing their own offering directly on the Google Results page before any kind of paid or organic links in a highly competitive area?
- reroute1 7y ago
  Do you know examples of these services? What can you search for that does this?
- infoseek12 7y ago
  Ya, it seems like a carefully orchestrated plan to envelop a big chunk of the internet. Google Featured Snippets began doing it with static content, now features like Google Flights are doing it with a lot of dynamic content. I especially dislike how they're pursuing this strategy in regards to Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google has done a lot of incredible things, and I think fears about killing the golden goose merit serious consideration, but all this does make one appreciate the value of antitrust laws. https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com?zd=1&zi=luurors7 https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
mola 7y ago
There was no real ad-tech concept before Google. We didn't really realized the problems with this business model and its effect on society until much later. I do believe that Google's claim to actually try and create good products, was an honest try to be "good". Search was a game changer, it really helped information be more accessible than ever. AdWords made sense, if people search for a product they won't mind seeing an ad for one. As opposed to tv commercials, which were the main ad platform, which was basically a brainwash machine sitting in people houses. Gmail was an amazing product that email much more useful for the non techie, and techie user. I believe, Google, as opposed to Facebook was honest in their mission statement. Facebook's "connecting people" was a sham from the get go, zukerberg's "dumb fuck" comments about his first users proves it. Google is an organism, organism change and adapt, corporates are organisms with one pure value function, shareholders bottom line. MBA types took control of the company because they are trained to optimize corporations to thrive, nothing else. I think saying Google was always evil is missing the real point. That corporations are not humans, they can't have human values while bottom line is the only value that counts.
air7 7y ago
The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click them and then actually willingly give money to the advertiser in exchange for something they offer. While it is annoying, and in a sense the 99.9% of us that don't click/buy any specific ad are paying the price (by wasting our attention for no personal gain), we all get tons of cool stuff for that price. Is it worth it? That's a different question, but it's not evil per se imo.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  > ads actually work. Yes. That's the (biggest) problem.
  - summerlight 7y ago
    No. The real problem is that no business model other than ads actually works for small to medium sized web sites at scale.
    - j88439h84 7y ago
      Subscriptions might work.
      - summerlight 7y ago
        Except there hasn't been any successful go-to services for web subscription model. Google Contributor program is exactly the one, but it gets no traction from either users or publishers. https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
        j88439h84 7y ago
        Netflix and The New Yorker, for example.
        7y ago
cryptozeus 7y ago
Agree with most of the points but I mean people want to work for google is also due to their tech and innovation. Look at the products that has come out if google !
- ProAm 7y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? Most projects get abandoned by the developers, or get canceled within 18 months. Search is good, maps is good. Everything else isn't industry leading or is just involuntary data collection (i.e. Android)
  - compiler-guy 7y ago
    There are thousands of internal projects that are never cancelled and are very innovative. Serving queries at Google scale in Google times involves massive amounts of custom hardware, custom infrastructure, reliability engineering and many other things. Many projects are cancelled, and I hate that, but that isn't really what life is like on the inside.
  - cryptozeus 7y ago
    No not being sarcastic...projects you mentioned alone were world changing when they came out.
    - ProAm 7y ago
      Which did Google invent vs which did they buy?
emtel 7y ago
Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if you want, but that's a different matter. And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But, everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception necessary.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work, ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally misunderstood what google is. See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this reduction. Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes. (To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is focused.)
  - soylentcola 7y ago
    It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time. But to everyone else, they're a source of information and entertainment that's available to anyone with an antenna, a tuner, and a speaker/display. And again, it's not as if broadcast media are universally great, but there's value in them outside of the advertising business.
viburnum 7y ago
Google’s founders easily could have run the company to be purely a force for good. They have a huge amount of equity and the company generated huge profits before it went all-in on maximizing ad revenue. They could have used share buybacks to buy out their other investors. They could have been billionaires who created something good but they choose to be $50 billionaires instead. Now the only option left is to regulate Google the way natural monopolies used to be regulated.
greentrust 7y ago
> fundamentally this was an ad-tech company Sure ads are their only real revenue source but the vast majority of engineers there are not working on ad-tech, many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome, that drastically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Your view is quite cynical and conveniently ignores the leverage and impact that an engineer can have there.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome All of those exist purely to expand opportunities to show more ads.
  - ryan93 7y ago
    Ads aren’t hurting you or anyone else
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      The entire purpose of ads is to psychologically manipulate people into taking actions against their own best interests. If you need a thing you will just go and buy it yourself after all.
lisper 7y ago
> they were deeply ashamed of how they made money I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, so I can tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely, 100% wrong about this. To the contrary, in the early days we believed (correctly) that we were improving the situation by providing text-based ads that were related to the search the user was conducting rather than the indiscriminate banner ads that were the standard in the industry at the time. We were proud of what we were doing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with being "Googley".
- zapita 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again?
  - lisper 7y ago
    > Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? No. I'm pretty horrified at what it has become actually. > If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again? Of course. But I would use my foreknowledge to try to steer things in a better direction.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit? That aside, I can't fathom any other sense that amounts to "my scientific and programming expertise is required to build this ad business, and I feel a duty to do it".
      - lisper 7y ago
        > Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit? Yes. Of course. :-) Also because I feel like I kinda screwed it up the first time and it would be a chance to redeem myself.
patrec 7y ago
Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to sell you stuff based on buildling up some asinine aspirational self-image almost entirely unrelated to the advertised product, you actually got low key, clearly demarcated, non-intrusive text-only ads, relevant to what your were looking for at the moment. And the ads funded genuinely cool and transformative tech. A lot of technical people would have been qute happy to work for that. It just turned out that the social good of making the tumor of advertisement benign and even possibly a net positive didn't pay as well as slowly evolving a strain of previously unheard of malignancy.
oppositelock 7y ago
I worked at google for 8 years, 2005-2013, and I disagree with your statement. Nobody was ashamed of how we made money, and the ads organization was a great place to be an engineer and get promoted. Early on, 20% time most certainly did exist, but you had to push for it, and among some managers, it was impossible to get it during normal work hours, but in the broader organization, it existed. People genuinely did try to do the right thing. Google was not my first job, I had already been working for quite a few years, so I had many earlier silicon valley companies to compare it against, and it genuinely was a fun, interesting and well meaning place to work. That started to shift over time and turn into a bureaucratic corporation where people were no longer rewarded on merit, and so I left, that was six years ago. During the years that I enjoyed there, we got to work on some truly difficult problems in terms of scale, built a whole lot of cool stuff that's helpful to the world, but doesn't make money (Maps, for example). These cool projects happened because advertising brought in so much money that we could waste some on providing something of value without clear financial return, and Sergey, Larry, and Eric were behind that. So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.
- riversflow 7y ago
  This is the same sort of bias I witness in Facebook. >Built a whole lot of cool stuff that’s helpful to the world, but doesn’t make money(Maps, for example). Through your lens, perhaps, from my perspective you made a series of sophisticated data harvesting apparatuses for one of the biggest advertisers on the planet. You conflate the work Google has done with something like OSM. The fact that open source Android is corrupted by Google Play services belies the idea that they work for anyone but themselves, one of the largest businesses in the world.
  - deleted 7y ago
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- Despegar 7y ago
  >So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt. I certainly wasn't saying that rank-and-file Google employees were dishonest. Larry and Sergey understood that advertising could be deeply corrupting, and they said it themselves in their paper [1]: >8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. >Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. The "Googley" culture was an artifice built to paper over the central conflict of Google. I'm sure that the early years were great and that everyone genuinely believed they could avoid being corrupted by it. But a leopard can't change its spots and in the end that's what happened. [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
j-c-hewitt 7y ago
Google is a company that sells multi hundred dollar clicks to lawyers, locksmiths, insurance companies, and brokerages. Plus a lot of cheap ads to everyone else. It is not very romantic to be writing software to connect people to the DUI lawyer they are looking for with incrementally improving efficiency. It's not nuts to create a romantic narrative to motivate your employees, but it is more than a little dishonest to try to convince investors that they are buying into something that's heading into a better direction than the digital edition of the Yellow Pages. However, you can't say that investors have not wanted something to believe in -- and Alphabet was more than happy to fulfill the desire for tech stock fairy tales. Despite this the fundamentals of selling search ad insurance leads to insurance salesmen is a great business from a numbers perspective. I think it's sort of an open question about whether or not it makes sense to burnish corporate brands with saving the world fairy tales, but the smartest people in America have decided that fairy tales are what works, so that is what they put people to work in burnishing and promoting. Obviously it has worked pretty well for a lot of companies, especially considering that they are competing with companies that sell candy, toothpaste, and fizzy corn syrup fluid for investor attention and acclaim. Even McDonalds is now saving the world with burgers or something, and that's because these kinds of spiritual fables have been so successful in helping companies to stand out from the pack. Your Yahoo comparison is a good one. Google at the end of the day is a marginally improved iteration of Yahoo with a slightly broader product offering and better core services. However, Google's brand fluff makes it appear to be something so much different and more grand than Yahoo 2. For what it's worth I think the old Google statement that they were here to organize the world's information and to make it more accessible and organized is a big enough goal as it is: they don't also have to be a rocketry and car navigation system company.
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ocdtrekkie 7y ago

This. I think the belief that Google wasn't evil and is losing its way come from people not wanting to accept they'd been duped. The company was always evil. It was always built around selling your attention to advertisers who want you to buy things. And ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results. As ad blockers have become popular and the demand for continual growth has remained steady, the costs they accepted to hide their evil were the first expense to get cut.

shadowgovt 7y ago
I think it's worse than that. I think "Don't be evil" implied that the company sought to avoid taking its highly-trained technical talent and applying them to the job of, say, weapons systems. In that sense, they weren't evil; attention shifting isn't nearly as bad as drone targeting. ... but if the money isn't there in ads in the future, I don't expect the company to just curl up and die. It'll be interesting to see what comes next when "The smartest people" need to find something to do.
- bjornjaja 7y ago
  Smart people gravitate to AI like a magnet. Or completely tangential things like starting a bakery, restaurant, etc. We’re all going to be left in a Wall-E universe though unless they help fight climate change.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    I think you're right on the AI, and I think Google agrees. https://ai.google/ https://ai.google/ Problem is, while there's certainly money in applications of AI (the ad auction is one of them), it's unclear that "AI" as a discipline is a money-factory like ads is. Google's looking for a money factory to replace ads because they're worried about that revenue stream being fragile (for the reasons ocdtrekkie highlighted).
  - Filligree 7y ago
    Fight climate change? How? "The smart people" provided a recipe for preventing/fixing climate change several decades ago. The politicians have never gone along, and now it's pretty much too late. It's no use hoping for a magic technical solution -- the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission".
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      "the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission"." Why? Internalizing externalities with a tax only works if the actual correct amount of those externalities equals or exceeds the amount that would reduce demand for fuel enough to stop climate change. This is a huge assumption that I never see anyone even acknowledge needs to be demonstrated. I think in fact they are far less, but my point is that debating that would be a red herring, since people seem to talk of externalities while never even believing in the concept, and that tension needs to be resolved. The externalities are a number that in principle has a correct value, and the increase in price to change behavior sufficiently to stop warming is another number that independently has a certain value. But you have to have a logical reason for thinking they match if you think internalizing the costs is a solution.
    - bjornjaja 7y ago
- mjparrott 7y ago
  I'd say creating the surveillance state is on par with weapons systems, drones, etc. The fact that every American is spied on (I know they accepted the T&Cs) and has zero privacy anymore is not "don't be evil".
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Not if the people actually ask for it. Adoption shows people want the features the "surveillance state" empowers. A definition that calls that evil also calls auto manufacturers evil because of the car accident rate.
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  Sure; In the same way that a pediatrician would have the slogan "Don't diddle kids." If you need a slogan like that, there is already a problem. Eventually, as we saw, they couldn't help themselves -- Maybe just one little oppression platform wouldn't be such a big deal...
CWuestefeld 7y ago
ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true. Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results. And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't. You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.
- the_duke 7y ago
  > always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads I would not call a tiny label saying "Ad", with the same color as the text right next to it, a clear distinction. When using a browser without an ad blocker, I often click on ads by accident. It's very far from the clearly distinguishable background that ads used to have, and designed to be easily overlooked.
- givinguflac 7y ago
  Google literally sells the top spots on results pages to advertisers. Come on. A little notation many will ignore doesn’t make it not a sale of the top spot.
- shantly 7y ago
  > And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't. They do exactly that on mobile, and if you watch non-geeks use Google they cannot reliably spot the ad versus the "natural" results. Hell, I tap the ad about half the time, because I'm in a hurry and don't look closely enough, and they've extorted the owner of whatever company I'm searching for to pay for their own name so the top result is an ad for the thing I obviously wanted to find anyway.

shadowgovt 7y ago

While it's made them financially successful, it is in some sense a bit depressing that the company has spent years casting about for an economic engine that will generate revenue as efficiently as ads and nothing has been found. One could ask for better of the world, but the world does not deliver. "People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine.

kareemm 7y ago
> People's attention" is the highest ROI resource to mine. It’s the scarcest resource we all have. Makes sense that mining it is so valuable.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

Nobody in any of these articles complains about ads, so that is nonsense. They complain about becoming like Apple and handing over unrestricted access to data to the Chinese government or about becoming like Palantir. They also complain about bigwigs being protected after harassing lower level workers. Those things, and the no-poach agreement Google entered with Steve Jobs, are evil.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
People expect ad-tech companies to be evil; once you've sold your soul once the second time it's a lot cheaper.
mcguire 7y ago
Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary. Once upon a time, Google was the most admired, brilliant company on the net and doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates. Then Google bought doubleclick...
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > Of course they don't complain about ads; that's paying their salary. You agree then that GGP's assertion doesn't fit the data. > doubleclick.net was universally reviled for pushing all the ad tech that everybody hates I'm willing to bet your company uses that ad-tech. The reason I dislike Google is for all the actually evil things it has done. Its implementation of ad-tech doesn't pass the evil bar.

matz1 7y ago

What dishonest about "Don't be evil" ? The definition of evil is relative and subjective. Lets say building weapons systems to suppress dissident, is it evil ? It depends on who do you ask.

npongratz 7y ago
Sure, that's cool. Then I can also redefine words, sometimes retroactively and perhaps in contradiction to reason and rationality, as I see fit, to match whatever I subjectively feel is in my best interests.
- matz1 7y ago
  Are you saying evil is not subjective ? What is your reason and rationality ?
  - zepto 7y ago
    Pain is subjective too, but it's reasonable to say that being poked in the eye it's painful.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Sure, its painful to you, but there may exist some people who will describe it as pleasure instead of pain.
      - zepto 7y ago
        I’m sure there are, but it would be stupid to say as a result that in general it’s not painful.

rainyMammoth 7y ago

you described this better than I would ever have. I also always thought that the whole "Google got the best engineers in the world" was the best marketing campaign ever. Reinforced by all those people amazed by the stupid Google interview questions (how many ping pong ball in a 747?). It's amazing that all those engineers thinking of themselves as best in the world managed to get duped so easily by a marketing scheme.

earthboundkid 7y ago
That's interesting. Google certainly did pick up a number of world class engineers from Microsoft and Bell Labs (Ken Thompson!). I wonder though if it was a conscious strategy to get these top-level engineers in order to retain a vast pool of average-level engineers by inflating their egos with the positive association.

GoodDreams 7y ago

Speaking of shame: Many people in the Bay Area blame tech workers for their woes. A friend of mine, an engineer at Google, also believes this and feels much shame. If they can focus on what others are doing wrong it makes them feel a little better.

ex_ex_nihilo 7y ago
A couple of years ago I was walking around downtown SF, and I noticed someone had drawn a chalk outline on the sidewalk and labeled it "techie fuck". I had a good chuckle. We are not loved there.
- lukifer 7y ago
  The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian. Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/ https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

rapind 7y ago

I see this as obvious. We should always expect a company to gravitate to whatever policies generate the most revenue and fight off the competition. Anything else is a Disney fairytale. In Google's case I think they were playing the long game and the "do no evil" mantra wasn't disingenuous, but they still need to compete. /shrug Eventually this is all going to get regulated, and the real story is how incredibly long it is taking to implement that regulation.

duckkg5 7y ago

Wow, you nailed it. The culture was easily the #1 reason IMO that Google kept getting getting on top of the top places to work lists. No other company could do it such a that scale - transparency, freedom to work on stuff you like, free food, having TGIFs (or TGITs) where you can ask the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in history to his face why the company chose to do XYZ last week. And no one there really, truly actually appreciates the fact that the entire empire is built on digital ads. Yes it's known, but it's not appreciated. It's just kind of understood that the business org sells ads so the rest of the company can work on other things, almost none of which make money and are largely built to squeeze out competitors in a given space that they can't or won't acquire. It's no longer a place I'd ever want to work again and hasn't been for years.

lallysingh 7y ago
There's a scale here for "evil" and it seems this discussion is sloppily equating all evil as the same. But it's mostly subjective. They also serve meat (including veal) in the cafes. Some find that pretty bad. Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons. Is weapons research evil? Hurts people in new ways, also can deter violence and defend from bad guys. But, can we say without hesitation that it's just as evil as helping ICE break up families, or helping Chinese censorship? People joined Google knowing about the ads (and the meat) but didn't expect other stuff they're seeing now. And that's perfectly reasonable. Few firms (any?) pass every possible "not evil test," so let's strengthen the quality of the debate here by avoiding logical sloppiness that would invalidate the important questions being discussed.
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  >Are web ads evil? Some will say yes for the intrusion, or the interruption, or the compound effect of all the ads people see in they're lives. All valid reasons. It's entirely possible to run ads based on what might be of interest to someone reading that particular content without spying on users. It's just not as profitable.

john_moscow 7y ago

Oh, their recent way to make money with hotel/flight bookings, restaurant reviews, etc is even scarier. They essentially use their search engine market domination to find out who else makes money off the biggest searches, and then clone those products and show the clones on top of the originals. Good luck competing with that...

shdh 7y ago
Wouldn’t doing the same thing be feasible to anyone with access to Google Trends?
- john_moscow 7y ago
  You mean, placing their own offering directly on the Google Results page before any kind of paid or organic links in a highly competitive area?
reroute1 7y ago
Do you know examples of these services? What can you search for that does this?
infoseek12 7y ago
Ya, it seems like a carefully orchestrated plan to envelop a big chunk of the internet. Google Featured Snippets began doing it with static content, now features like Google Flights are doing it with a lot of dynamic content. I especially dislike how they're pursuing this strategy in regards to Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google has done a lot of incredible things, and I think fears about killing the golden goose merit serious consideration, but all this does make one appreciate the value of antitrust laws. https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com?zd=1&zi=luurors7 https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

mola 7y ago

There was no real ad-tech concept before Google. We didn't really realized the problems with this business model and its effect on society until much later. I do believe that Google's claim to actually try and create good products, was an honest try to be "good". Search was a game changer, it really helped information be more accessible than ever. AdWords made sense, if people search for a product they won't mind seeing an ad for one. As opposed to tv commercials, which were the main ad platform, which was basically a brainwash machine sitting in people houses. Gmail was an amazing product that email much more useful for the non techie, and techie user. I believe, Google, as opposed to Facebook was honest in their mission statement. Facebook's "connecting people" was a sham from the get go, zukerberg's "dumb fuck" comments about his first users proves it. Google is an organism, organism change and adapt, corporates are organisms with one pure value function, shareholders bottom line. MBA types took control of the company because they are trained to optimize corporations to thrive, nothing else. I think saying Google was always evil is missing the real point. That corporations are not humans, they can't have human values while bottom line is the only value that counts.

air7 7y ago

The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click them and then actually willingly give money to the advertiser in exchange for something they offer. While it is annoying, and in a sense the 99.9% of us that don't click/buy any specific ad are paying the price (by wasting our attention for no personal gain), we all get tons of cool stuff for that price. Is it worth it? That's a different question, but it's not evil per se imo.

Nullabillity 7y ago
> ads actually work. Yes. That's the (biggest) problem.
- summerlight 7y ago
  No. The real problem is that no business model other than ads actually works for small to medium sized web sites at scale.
  - j88439h84 7y ago
    Subscriptions might work.
    - summerlight 7y ago
      Except there hasn't been any successful go-to services for web subscription model. Google Contributor program is exactly the one, but it gets no traction from either users or publishers. https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
      - j88439h84 7y ago
        Netflix and The New Yorker, for example.
        7y ago

cryptozeus 7y ago

Agree with most of the points but I mean people want to work for google is also due to their tech and innovation. Look at the products that has come out if google !

ProAm 7y ago
Are you being sarcastic? Most projects get abandoned by the developers, or get canceled within 18 months. Search is good, maps is good. Everything else isn't industry leading or is just involuntary data collection (i.e. Android)
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  There are thousands of internal projects that are never cancelled and are very innovative. Serving queries at Google scale in Google times involves massive amounts of custom hardware, custom infrastructure, reliability engineering and many other things. Many projects are cancelled, and I hate that, but that isn't really what life is like on the inside.
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  No not being sarcastic...projects you mentioned alone were world changing when they came out.
  - ProAm 7y ago
    Which did Google invent vs which did they buy?

emtel 7y ago

Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if you want, but that's a different matter. And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But, everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception necessary.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work, ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally misunderstood what google is. See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this reduction. Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes. (To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is focused.)
- soylentcola 7y ago
  It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time. But to everyone else, they're a source of information and entertainment that's available to anyone with an antenna, a tuner, and a speaker/display. And again, it's not as if broadcast media are universally great, but there's value in them outside of the advertising business.

viburnum 7y ago

Google’s founders easily could have run the company to be purely a force for good. They have a huge amount of equity and the company generated huge profits before it went all-in on maximizing ad revenue. They could have used share buybacks to buy out their other investors. They could have been billionaires who created something good but they choose to be $50 billionaires instead. Now the only option left is to regulate Google the way natural monopolies used to be regulated.

greentrust 7y ago

> fundamentally this was an ad-tech company Sure ads are their only real revenue source but the vast majority of engineers there are not working on ad-tech, many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome, that drastically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Your view is quite cynical and conveniently ignores the leverage and impact that an engineer can have there.

goatinaboat 7y ago
many of them are working on transformative projects like maps, translate, android, chrome All of those exist purely to expand opportunities to show more ads.
- ryan93 7y ago
  Ads aren’t hurting you or anyone else
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    The entire purpose of ads is to psychologically manipulate people into taking actions against their own best interests. If you need a thing you will just go and buy it yourself after all.

lisper 7y ago

> they were deeply ashamed of how they made money I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, so I can tell you from firsthand experience that you are absolutely, 100% wrong about this. To the contrary, in the early days we believed (correctly) that we were improving the situation by providing text-based ads that were related to the search the user was conducting rather than the indiscriminate banner ads that were the standard in the industry at the time. We were proud of what we were doing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with being "Googley".

zapita 7y ago
Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again?
- lisper 7y ago
  > Out of curiosity, are you proud of Google’s ad business today and its impact on the world? No. I'm pretty horrified at what it has become actually. > If you could go back knowing what you know now, would you do it again? Of course. But I would use my foreknowledge to try to steer things in a better direction.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit? That aside, I can't fathom any other sense that amounts to "my scientific and programming expertise is required to build this ad business, and I feel a duty to do it".
    - lisper 7y ago
      > Why "of course"? For the obvious financial benefit? Yes. Of course. :-) Also because I feel like I kinda screwed it up the first time and it would be a chance to redeem myself.

patrec 7y ago

Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to sell you stuff based on buildling up some asinine aspirational self-image almost entirely unrelated to the advertised product, you actually got low key, clearly demarcated, non-intrusive text-only ads, relevant to what your were looking for at the moment. And the ads funded genuinely cool and transformative tech. A lot of technical people would have been qute happy to work for that. It just turned out that the social good of making the tumor of advertisement benign and even possibly a net positive didn't pay as well as slowly evolving a strain of previously unheard of malignancy.

oppositelock 7y ago

I worked at google for 8 years, 2005-2013, and I disagree with your statement. Nobody was ashamed of how we made money, and the ads organization was a great place to be an engineer and get promoted. Early on, 20% time most certainly did exist, but you had to push for it, and among some managers, it was impossible to get it during normal work hours, but in the broader organization, it existed. People genuinely did try to do the right thing. Google was not my first job, I had already been working for quite a few years, so I had many earlier silicon valley companies to compare it against, and it genuinely was a fun, interesting and well meaning place to work. That started to shift over time and turn into a bureaucratic corporation where people were no longer rewarded on merit, and so I left, that was six years ago. During the years that I enjoyed there, we got to work on some truly difficult problems in terms of scale, built a whole lot of cool stuff that's helpful to the world, but doesn't make money (Maps, for example). These cool projects happened because advertising brought in so much money that we could waste some on providing something of value without clear financial return, and Sergey, Larry, and Eric were behind that. So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt.

riversflow 7y ago
This is the same sort of bias I witness in Facebook. >Built a whole lot of cool stuff that’s helpful to the world, but doesn’t make money(Maps, for example). Through your lens, perhaps, from my perspective you made a series of sophisticated data harvesting apparatuses for one of the biggest advertisers on the planet. You conflate the work Google has done with something like OSM. The fact that open source Android is corrupted by Google Play services belies the idea that they work for anyone but themselves, one of the largest businesses in the world.
- deleted 7y ago
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Despegar 7y ago
>So, Google was not dishonest from the start, it was idealistic, and then at some point, the idealism crashed into reality, and that's when things started to change. The initial attempt at a unique culture was an honest attempt. I certainly wasn't saying that rank-and-file Google employees were dishonest. Larry and Sergey understood that advertising could be deeply corrupting, and they said it themselves in their paper [1]: >8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. >Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. The "Googley" culture was an artifice built to paper over the central conflict of Google. I'm sure that the early years were great and that everyone genuinely believed they could avoid being corrupted by it. But a leopard can't change its spots and in the end that's what happened. [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

j-c-hewitt 7y ago

Google is a company that sells multi hundred dollar clicks to lawyers, locksmiths, insurance companies, and brokerages. Plus a lot of cheap ads to everyone else. It is not very romantic to be writing software to connect people to the DUI lawyer they are looking for with incrementally improving efficiency. It's not nuts to create a romantic narrative to motivate your employees, but it is more than a little dishonest to try to convince investors that they are buying into something that's heading into a better direction than the digital edition of the Yellow Pages. However, you can't say that investors have not wanted something to believe in -- and Alphabet was more than happy to fulfill the desire for tech stock fairy tales. Despite this the fundamentals of selling search ad insurance leads to insurance salesmen is a great business from a numbers perspective. I think it's sort of an open question about whether or not it makes sense to burnish corporate brands with saving the world fairy tales, but the smartest people in America have decided that fairy tales are what works, so that is what they put people to work in burnishing and promoting. Obviously it has worked pretty well for a lot of companies, especially considering that they are competing with companies that sell candy, toothpaste, and fizzy corn syrup fluid for investor attention and acclaim. Even McDonalds is now saving the world with burgers or something, and that's because these kinds of spiritual fables have been so successful in helping companies to stand out from the pack. Your Yahoo comparison is a good one. Google at the end of the day is a marginally improved iteration of Yahoo with a slightly broader product offering and better core services. However, Google's brand fluff makes it appear to be something so much different and more grand than Yahoo 2. For what it's worth I think the old Google statement that they were here to organize the world's information and to make it more accessible and organized is a big enough goal as it is: they don't also have to be a rocketry and car navigation system company.

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