6 ms·

In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believe

In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.

riffraff 5y ago
I don't know. Google 20 years ago felt good. All the stuff about FLOSS vs proprietary software. Support for open standards. The summer of code. A search that seemed to reward quality content over paid results. There was reason to doubt, but I think at some point the motto was legitimately aligned with the company interests and everyone benefited from it, until it wasn't.
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
>I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line The thing is, so did the founders of Google. The issue is not that they were lying to you.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Eric Schmidt put in that line because many times engineers said ,,that would be evil'' when another person suggested something, and Eric wanted to create a strong engineering culture for hiring the best software engineers. He talks about it in the first Tim Ferriss interview. I was quite happy at Google while he was CEO and I hated it when Larry took over, things got boring....Sergey would have been so much more fun.
dtech 5y ago
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
- samizdis 5y ago
  I'm having an ironic morning of it. I also posted [1] from The Register a piece about China's antitrust watchdog, which seems to be advocating for policies one can only envy. (What emerges in reality, though, is unlikely to live up to my optimism.) If I were at The Register, I'd look for a way to combine that China news article with the Google opinion piece of this thread. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064865
  - happycube 5y ago
    There, if you don't play with the unwritten rules, you get clobbered by the written ones...
- iamtheworstdev 5y ago
  well, people could have been more willing to pay for email. Google's search engine was top notch for sure. But when we gave them the right to scan our emails we really handed over the keys to the kingdom.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    I doubt willingness to pay would be a factor. To my knowledge, Gmail (or any other google services) didn't start off paid, bomb, and then they made free but paid for with privacy. I think aside from having 20/20 hindsight to avoid their services and tell others to do the same (which you cant really blame people for not having), I doubt theres much we could do. I guess theres the whole "vote with your wallet" thing, but again, I think that argument is largely made with the benefit of hindsight
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      The point was that other email (even with a GUI served over the web) services were available when gmail was introduced, and you did have to pay for many of them. IIRC I was using something called "zworg". I almost regret getting a gmail invite early enough to be able to snag my first and last names with no number, since I am constantly getting all sorts of messages that include surprisingly private information about the various "Jess Austin"s around the world who are getting married, renting "flats", going on vacation, considering cosmetic surgery, etc. I don't know whether these various Ms. Austins have forgotten their email addresses, or perhaps their friends and service providers can't be bothered to use those.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marginalia_nu 5y ago
If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests. It's a jarring contrast to what Google is today. "[...] 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. " [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [2] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
- mc32 5y ago
  From a viability perspective they might not have had a choice —but they could at least have put up a fight. Overture, which they acquired, did paid ranking, which is reminiscent of AOLs keyword(s). If Google had stuck to their ideals, someone would have come around and commercialized the idea (as Google did). The tragedy is Google didn’t try to stall all out commercialization but rather doubled down on it. Initially they may have been afraid of becoming the AltaVista, the best, but usurped by someone better because they weren’t investing gigantic profits back into it to assure dominance. In the end they became the monster they feared, and not a docile one at that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I think the main reason they've gone down the route they have is a lack of competition to keep them honest. Microsoft tried with Bing, but it was too little and much too late. DDG has helped a bit even if it's mostly rebranded Bing-data, but we're still far away from having a healthy search ecosystem.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests. What else could they write, even if they were already Satan incarnated? "We could not care less about search relevance as long as we make big bucks, and if we can sacrifice it in the future, we will"? I doubt it would have helped with Google's adoption. Whatever they wrote is just marketing. At best, they believed their own marketing, but they still made a for profit company. People who don't do it for profit, don't go to build a for profit behemoth. Even in 1999, everybody could tell where Brin/Page stand relative to someone like Linus or Jonas Salk, for example.
cinntaile 5y ago
Altavista was garbage compared to Google at the time, that's why everyone switched in the first place.
- mech422 5y ago
  Guess it depends on what you mean by garbage... I loved altavista - especially the 'near' keyword. But it didn't have as large an index as google. As the web grew, it just fell further behind.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    The results were less relevant.
Kye 5y ago
I remember a story from someone at Google about someone who emailed them with a number every once in a while, and the number kept going up. They finally figured out it was the size of the Google home page, and the person was making sure they knew when it was getting bigger. It was something small, but big for the time. It's now almost 1MB zipped.
- andrewinardeer 5y ago
  I thought it was the number of characters on their homepage that was emailed to them, not the size of the page in mb.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    There was a time when the number of characters was the sensible metric.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I believe altervista would be terrible today. The same with early google. The web has changed. If you look at page rank, it is basically a random walk of the internet and most visited locations get the highest rank. Today you simply cannot trust websites to link to content just for the love of sharing good content. You can’t even trust webpages to be relevant to the keywords they write in their content. You can’t even trust them to show the same content to search engines as they show to regular users. A modern search engine has an adverse relationship to the pages it is indexing. In the good old days they had a trusting relationship.
- Loughla 5y ago
  >In the good old days they had a trusting relationship. It's almost like there need to be clearly defined and agreed upon rules for everyone to operate under, with clear consequences for failing to follow those rules. Sort of like some kind of, well, legislation. Trust and social norms setting expectation is fine when it works. But it will eventually stop working. So what's the answer after that? How do we fix it without making it worse via legislation or regulation?
2-718-281-828 5y ago
same here ... even further back I belonged to those people who congratulated their parents for joining facebook and whatsapp - so cringy. now I myself am using neither of those services any longer. feels good on one level but also futile on a deeper.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I too believed this "don't be evil" nonsense. I made my Google account the center of my online life because I believed it. Migrating to more open technologies is proving to be extremely annoying now due to how entrenched it is in my life. In the end, "don't be evil" wasn't really a principle, it was just Google's marketing and marketing cannot be trusted. Everything these people say is nonsense. We must watch what they actually do instead. Only actions matter.
kibwen 5y ago
We were all naive in believing that a company that embraced open source could still manage to exercise such ruthless control. We believed that access to source code would save us from any face-heel turn, but that turns out to be a consolation prize at best in the face of such a leviathan adversary.

riffraff 5y ago

I don't know. Google 20 years ago felt good. All the stuff about FLOSS vs proprietary software. Support for open standards. The summer of code. A search that seemed to reward quality content over paid results. There was reason to doubt, but I think at some point the motto was legitimately aligned with the company interests and everyone benefited from it, until it wasn't.

AlgorithmicTime 5y ago

>I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line The thing is, so did the founders of Google. The issue is not that they were lying to you.

xiphias2 5y ago
Eric Schmidt put in that line because many times engineers said ,,that would be evil'' when another person suggested something, and Eric wanted to create a strong engineering culture for hiring the best software engineers. He talks about it in the first Tim Ferriss interview. I was quite happy at Google while he was CEO and I hated it when Larry took over, things got boring....Sergey would have been so much more fun.

dtech 5y ago

I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.

samizdis 5y ago
I'm having an ironic morning of it. I also posted [1] from The Register a piece about China's antitrust watchdog, which seems to be advocating for policies one can only envy. (What emerges in reality, though, is unlikely to live up to my optimism.) If I were at The Register, I'd look for a way to combine that China news article with the Google opinion piece of this thread. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064865
- happycube 5y ago
  There, if you don't play with the unwritten rules, you get clobbered by the written ones...
iamtheworstdev 5y ago
well, people could have been more willing to pay for email. Google's search engine was top notch for sure. But when we gave them the right to scan our emails we really handed over the keys to the kingdom.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  I doubt willingness to pay would be a factor. To my knowledge, Gmail (or any other google services) didn't start off paid, bomb, and then they made free but paid for with privacy. I think aside from having 20/20 hindsight to avoid their services and tell others to do the same (which you cant really blame people for not having), I doubt theres much we could do. I guess theres the whole "vote with your wallet" thing, but again, I think that argument is largely made with the benefit of hindsight
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    The point was that other email (even with a GUI served over the web) services were available when gmail was introduced, and you did have to pay for many of them. IIRC I was using something called "zworg". I almost regret getting a gmail invite early enough to be able to snag my first and last names with no number, since I am constantly getting all sorts of messages that include surprisingly private information about the various "Jess Austin"s around the world who are getting married, renting "flats", going on vacation, considering cosmetic surgery, etc. I don't know whether these various Ms. Austins have forgotten their email addresses, or perhaps their friends and service providers can't be bothered to use those.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marginalia_nu 5y ago

If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests. It's a jarring contrast to what Google is today. "[...] 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. " [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [2] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

mc32 5y ago
From a viability perspective they might not have had a choice —but they could at least have put up a fight. Overture, which they acquired, did paid ranking, which is reminiscent of AOLs keyword(s). If Google had stuck to their ideals, someone would have come around and commercialized the idea (as Google did). The tragedy is Google didn’t try to stall all out commercialization but rather doubled down on it. Initially they may have been afraid of becoming the AltaVista, the best, but usurped by someone better because they weren’t investing gigantic profits back into it to assure dominance. In the end they became the monster they feared, and not a docile one at that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think the main reason they've gone down the route they have is a lack of competition to keep them honest. Microsoft tried with Bing, but it was too little and much too late. DDG has helped a bit even if it's mostly rebranded Bing-data, but we're still far away from having a healthy search ecosystem.
coldtea 5y ago
>If you go back and read the stuff from Brin and Page at the time, they do actually go to quite some lengths explaining how crucially important it is for search results to be relevant, and the original PageRank paper even outlines methods for reducing manipulation from commercial interests. What else could they write, even if they were already Satan incarnated? "We could not care less about search relevance as long as we make big bucks, and if we can sacrifice it in the future, we will"? I doubt it would have helped with Google's adoption. Whatever they wrote is just marketing. At best, they believed their own marketing, but they still made a for profit company. People who don't do it for profit, don't go to build a for profit behemoth. Even in 1999, everybody could tell where Brin/Page stand relative to someone like Linus or Jonas Salk, for example.

cinntaile 5y ago

Altavista was garbage compared to Google at the time, that's why everyone switched in the first place.

mech422 5y ago
Guess it depends on what you mean by garbage... I loved altavista - especially the 'near' keyword. But it didn't have as large an index as google. As the web grew, it just fell further behind.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  The results were less relevant.

Kye 5y ago

I remember a story from someone at Google about someone who emailed them with a number every once in a while, and the number kept going up. They finally figured out it was the size of the Google home page, and the person was making sure they knew when it was getting bigger. It was something small, but big for the time. It's now almost 1MB zipped.

andrewinardeer 5y ago
I thought it was the number of characters on their homepage that was emailed to them, not the size of the page in mb.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  There was a time when the number of characters was the sensible metric.

wodenokoto 5y ago

I believe altervista would be terrible today. The same with early google. The web has changed. If you look at page rank, it is basically a random walk of the internet and most visited locations get the highest rank. Today you simply cannot trust websites to link to content just for the love of sharing good content. You can’t even trust webpages to be relevant to the keywords they write in their content. You can’t even trust them to show the same content to search engines as they show to regular users. A modern search engine has an adverse relationship to the pages it is indexing. In the good old days they had a trusting relationship.

Loughla 5y ago
>In the good old days they had a trusting relationship. It's almost like there need to be clearly defined and agreed upon rules for everyone to operate under, with clear consequences for failing to follow those rules. Sort of like some kind of, well, legislation. Trust and social norms setting expectation is fine when it works. But it will eventually stop working. So what's the answer after that? How do we fix it without making it worse via legislation or regulation?

2-718-281-828 5y ago

same here ... even further back I belonged to those people who congratulated their parents for joining facebook and whatsapp - so cringy. now I myself am using neither of those services any longer. feels good on one level but also futile on a deeper.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

I too believed this "don't be evil" nonsense. I made my Google account the center of my online life because I believed it. Migrating to more open technologies is proving to be extremely annoying now due to how entrenched it is in my life. In the end, "don't be evil" wasn't really a principle, it was just Google's marketing and marketing cannot be trusted. Everything these people say is nonsense. We must watch what they actually do instead. Only actions matter.

kibwen 5y ago

We were all naive in believing that a company that embraced open source could still manage to exercise such ruthless control. We believed that access to source code would save us from any face-heel turn, but that turns out to be a consolation prize at best in the face of such a leviathan adversary.