Not to defend Google, but in Google's defense... 1. The favoritism for PhD's was probably true in the past, but must certainly be less so now just because Goog

Not to defend Google, but in Google's defense... 1. The favoritism for PhD's was probably true in the past, but must certainly be less so now just because Google is growing so large. There aren't that many newly-minted PhD's each year. I know a significant number of people given Google offers right out of undergrad. 2. There are definitely metrics for goodness of search results. Even if you doubt their validity, doing a study by having real people compare results across search engines (blind) and choosing the results they like best can tell you whether Google's preferred to Yahoo!. 3. "Don't be evil" isn't the same thing as "don't ever, ever do anything that could be interpreted as evil by someone." I think the idea is more to try to be a good company in general. Hard decisions like censoring in China will always have to be made, though. 4. They're pretty different in terms of their perks and company culture from your standard company. I think you're being a bit brash re: the going green stuff. That is actually part of the culture--GOOG's had measures to incent environmental stuff for a while. It's not all announced in press releases, however. As for the MSFT/DoubleClick issue, you may be drawing a bit of a false analogy.