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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 pla

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.
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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

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
[deleted]

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