9 ms·

Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan

by pg 15y ago

Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan episode was obviously one rogue branch with insufficient oversight; as soon as the guys in Mountain View found out what was going on, they stopped it, and with a minimum of the sort of corporate doublespeak you'd expect from most big companies. The changes to privacy policies are the sort of thing hackers love to gripe about, but don't actually matter much. (How many HN readers are going to stop using Google because of them, for example?) All it really boils down to is that he's mad because his friend got cut off by Adsense. And it is uncool the way Google just blows people off like that, but it's not new. They've always been that way. So if you didn't hate Google 5 years ago, this post offers no reason to hate them now.

NelsonMinar 15y ago
I buried this in the post, but of all the things Google's done this month the promotion of Google Search Plus Your World (aka Search+) is what concerns me the most. The other negative stories are less significant, I only mentioned them because they're part of the trend I'm feeling. I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  I'd say Search Plus Your World is a cause for concern, but not for the reasons most people think. I'd say SPYW isn't evil, it is an admission of failure. In particular, I think it is an admission that Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul.
  - landhar 15y ago
    > Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results. My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else. I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means. My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.
- pg 15y ago
  I agree that's the most worrying sign. In the past Google won by making what people needed. But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook. That hasn't made Google evil yet. It's just the first step down the road to mediocrity. Which may lead to evil in the long term, because to make lots of money despite being mediocre, you generally have to do evil things. I don't think it's that interesting that anti-Google posts get reflexively upvoted though. The cause is one of the more common and least discriminating aspects of human nature: whenever any person or organization is successful, there are a lot of people who want to see them cut down to size.
  - ry0ohki 15y ago
    I don't believe Google is intentionally being evil, but they are definitely behaving a lot like the company they coined the phrase because of. In the 90s Microsoft was using it's huge installed user base advantage to push it's less popular and new-to-the-game browser on a group of people, while also keeping out the competition with some unfair ways. This seems identical to how Google is using it's position as leader of search to push it's late to the game and less popular social network onto it's users, while keeping out the competition.
    - nostromo 15y ago
      Changing your search engine is easy. Changing your OS is not.
      - waqf 15y ago
        How about changing your webmail provider, your mobile OS and the cloud services integrated with it?
        nostromo 15y ago
        http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/ I'm not saying Google is perfect, but they seem to take customer choice seriously. That's the exact opposite of Microsoft 10 years ago.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  >I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft. Ten years ago? How about now? The hate for Microsoft around here is so bad that winsupersite.com (the premier inside and latest Microsoft related news site) is completely banned from even submitting to HN, probably because of excessive flagging by haters [1]. Google hate is nothing compared to that. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883
  - spazcat 15y ago
    Observe the cognitive dissonance of people accusing Google of Big Company Badness and then going on to recommend Bing in the same breath.
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  Regarding your last line: reading some of the anti-Google stories going around (e.g. anything John Gruber or MG Siegler produce) actually made me stop and think whether I needed to go back and re-evaluate Microsoft as I may have just been swept along by the Apple cult attacking its strongest perceived competitors.
gaelian 15y ago
I upvoted this post not because it really brings anything new to the list of grievances against Google, but because I feel its important that the existing grievances not be forgotten. Also, this is one of the few places on the web where I am sure people from Google frequent. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and naive, but if highlighting posts like these help to shift Google back even just a little towards "Don't be evil" then it was worth my upvote.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
I found something more interesting in his post: that Google has maybe been regarded still as a startup, even though they are far, far from it. "Don't be evil" seems like a motto that would guide a startup; it's hard for me to imagine any company of Google's size and position seriously trying to follow such a screed. The end of his post is perfectly salient: let's reserve our enthusiasm and defesnes and cheerleading for actual startups, which no longer include Google.
cageface 15y ago
When a single company has a record of almost everything I do online I have to hold them to a much higher standard than other companies. Arguments about Google's intentions tend to swing to the emotional because the nature of their business requires that we trust them indefinitely. And the way they've handled a handful of these issues recently signals to me that they're feeling more and more comfortable straining that trust if it suits their agenda. So the increasing frequency of these posts is, I think, barometer of the growing, gut-feeling discomfort among the geek community.
- pasbesoin 15y ago
  I find myself agreeing with the last sentence. Gut reaction, but it seems to be a "something doesn't smell right" moment for Google. (Whether or not such reaction belongs on HN? I don't know; for all the rational thinking in this group, intuition still seems to play a pretty strong role.)
- ajross 15y ago
  Arguably, it's also a barometer of Google's increasing status as the primary corporate enemy of Apple Computer, Inc. My gut tells me that if someone actually did the survey they'd find that "Google is Evil" posts and upvotes correlate less with Civil Libertarian politics than they do with the manufacturer of the poster's phone and laptop.
  - marshray 15y ago
    Well, I haven't noticed that but I'm not out there in CA or an iPhone or a Mac user. The alleged Google/Apple hiring blacklist conspiracy seemed to cast them both in a pretty awful light. But the plural of "gut feeling" is not "data", it's...hmmm.
    - k-mcgrady 15y ago
      The no poaching agreements also included Adobe, Intuit and Intel.
  - stock_toaster 15y ago
kelnos 15y ago
Agreed. I was expecting to see him mention the no-employee-poaching collusion between Google, Apple, Intuit, etc. That is something that has drastically changed my opinion of Google recently. The other stuff he mentioned, not so much.
napierzaza 15y ago
Like any Google apologizing your post was upvoted reflexively. You efficiently summarized the talking points you were given.
tansey 15y ago
Hence the need for honeypots, pg. :)
kenjackson 15y ago
Well I think a lot of where Google crosses the line is becoming clearer now. For example, personalized ads in gmail. Try to opt-out of personalized ads in gmail, seriously go and try it. You can click the button, but they won't actually opt you out. At least not how you'd expect. You'll still get personalized ads, but they just use a different heuristic for how to personalize (based on the current email). How hard is it to not personalize my ads at all? It would be easy. But Google has opted to add value to advertisers over their users. This alone is one reason why I'm thinking of leaving gmail. Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.
- ramblerman 15y ago
  This has been a core facet of gmail for years. You get free email + storage - they post contextual ads on the right. The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms. >> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it. Yeah... sure
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms. I'm talking about something else. I'm talking specifically about the "option" of opting out of personalized (and there is a well hidden option that Google has for this), but it only changes the algorithm. You still get personalized ads. When I signed up for GMail when it first opened, this was not the case. >> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it. Yeah... sure Is this hard to believe? I just created a hotmail account. I need to try it on all my devices first. And then of course get my forwarding accounts switched to it. If all goes well I'll switch. The main concern is lack of imap so I'll use Exchange ActiveSync -- but since I don't generally use that today, I need to make sure it works fine. But there was a time when GMail was untouchable. Now its a service I can't wait to get off of.
rickmb 15y ago
It's a personal story of when someone stopped believing Google, not a deep analyses of why Google is "evil". For me Google stopped being credible when it did a 180 on net neutrality. There were good reasons before that, and there were certainly good reasons after that, but when someone or some company loses the benefit of the doubt is a personal thing. What currently pisses me off most about Google is their blatant disregard for privacy, more specifically their open and arrogant disdain for the way privacy is perceived (and protected by law) outside the US. In hindsight I "should" have started "hating" Google much earlier, and OMG, I still use Google. Doesn't make any single individual argument criticizing Google any less valid though. But most of all, the value in this post does not lie in his arguments, but in the fact that it illustrates the way in which Google is losing its supporters and its credibility as an ethical corporation.
- Jgrubb 15y ago
  In my humble opinion, and I apologize to any Facebook engineers who read this, but Facebook has touched off an ethical race to the bottom with regards to users, their privacy, and their information that can be sold to advertisers. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it's too bad nonetheless.
  - rickmb 15y ago
    Facebook was always in the game of collecting private data and exploiting it. It's in the nature of their product, you pretty much sign up for that up front. Google offered services that didn't explicitly require users to register personal data (with some exceptions, like Orkut), and only much later started collating and exploiting all the information they gathered by observing. The latter is much creepier. It's the difference between someone asking you to fill out a form with very personal information and someone who's spying on you through binoculars. Also, Google betrayed people's trust with their whole "don't be evil" thing. Most people never trusted Facebook very much to begin with. Many of us trusted Google. Betrayal pisses people off more than just being screwed.
    - jrockway 15y ago
paganel 15y ago
One reason for which I don't like Google anymore is that they broke their primary promise, which they were emphasizing more and more around 2004-2005 (if I remember correctly): to make most of the world's information easily accessible and shareable, and, why not?, trying to make a difference in this world. In my ideal world the Wikileaks info would have lived in a Google sub-domain, climate change discussions would have been based on open charts and data which would have been also hosted by Google (with available info going back since the first meteorological observations were made), mashups about Iraq and Afghanistan wars with geo-located user-uploaded photos could have lived at maps.google.com/war and so on and so on. I know that what I was dreaming about doesn't add any stock-market value or anything (and in the worst case scenario it gets you straight into jail), but that's at least what I call "changing the world, trying to make it a better place", like guys such as Diderot or d'Alembert did three centuries ago.
- jhuni 15y ago
  Don't stop dreaming.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
I think there is a lot of "hate" for Google these days, but I believe every bodies reasoning is different. This is OK, they have alienated so many of their users, but many in a different way. My current "hate" for google stems from them taking the social away from Google reader,I don't give two Sh!t$ about the policies being merged, I actually think that's a good thing. Someone else "hates" the new social merged into search. Honestly, I enjoy diversity in the services I use online. I want my music to be independent from my email to be independent from my "social network" (not to be confused with my "personal network", of which, email is a part of) I don't like what google has become, and if I wasn't firmly planted and reliant on gmail, I'd be google product free. RSS, search, and cloud storage are all now solved for me elsewhere, and social always has been. I'm sticking with gmail, because I'm not anti-google, and it's a fantastic product, but I've left google products because somethign better came along (dropbox killed any need for google docs, google killed their RSS as far as I'm concerned, and G+ never really did it for me (or any of my actual friends, although I've got thousands of followers, they're all from the HN circle...) Did I mention that I revel in diversity to keep my mind engaged and learning new things. I don't want my entire experience to be from google or facebooks window, I want wide open spaces of internet and applications. If you know what I mean. This is going to turn into a larger rant on the the course of "social media" and their networks. When I'm with certain groups of friends, I act and talk in a certain way, and by no means should some of that ever be public. I want to talk and communicate with some of the social group of mine online, but in no way shape or form should any of that be public as well. Many people can't make that distinction (hence the UK people being deported because of tweets) and I think the big companies are trying to ruin that divide between public and private.

by pg 15y ago

NelsonMinar 15y ago

I buried this in the post, but of all the things Google's done this month the promotion of Google Search Plus Your World (aka Search+) is what concerns me the most. The other negative stories are less significant, I only mentioned them because they're part of the trend I'm feeling. I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.

fpgeek 15y ago
I'd say Search Plus Your World is a cause for concern, but not for the reasons most people think. I'd say SPYW isn't evil, it is an admission of failure. In particular, I think it is an admission that Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul.
- landhar 15y ago
  > Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results. My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else. I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means. My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.
pg 15y ago
I agree that's the most worrying sign. In the past Google won by making what people needed. But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook. That hasn't made Google evil yet. It's just the first step down the road to mediocrity. Which may lead to evil in the long term, because to make lots of money despite being mediocre, you generally have to do evil things. I don't think it's that interesting that anti-Google posts get reflexively upvoted though. The cause is one of the more common and least discriminating aspects of human nature: whenever any person or organization is successful, there are a lot of people who want to see them cut down to size.
- ry0ohki 15y ago
  I don't believe Google is intentionally being evil, but they are definitely behaving a lot like the company they coined the phrase because of. In the 90s Microsoft was using it's huge installed user base advantage to push it's less popular and new-to-the-game browser on a group of people, while also keeping out the competition with some unfair ways. This seems identical to how Google is using it's position as leader of search to push it's late to the game and less popular social network onto it's users, while keeping out the competition.
  - nostromo 15y ago
    Changing your search engine is easy. Changing your OS is not.
    - waqf 15y ago
      How about changing your webmail provider, your mobile OS and the cloud services integrated with it?
      - nostromo 15y ago
        http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/ I'm not saying Google is perfect, but they seem to take customer choice seriously. That's the exact opposite of Microsoft 10 years ago.
cooldeal 15y ago
>I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft. Ten years ago? How about now? The hate for Microsoft around here is so bad that winsupersite.com (the premier inside and latest Microsoft related news site) is completely banned from even submitting to HN, probably because of excessive flagging by haters [1]. Google hate is nothing compared to that. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883
- spazcat 15y ago
  Observe the cognitive dissonance of people accusing Google of Big Company Badness and then going on to recommend Bing in the same breath.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
Regarding your last line: reading some of the anti-Google stories going around (e.g. anything John Gruber or MG Siegler produce) actually made me stop and think whether I needed to go back and re-evaluate Microsoft as I may have just been swept along by the Apple cult attacking its strongest perceived competitors.

gaelian 15y ago

I upvoted this post not because it really brings anything new to the list of grievances against Google, but because I feel its important that the existing grievances not be forgotten. Also, this is one of the few places on the web where I am sure people from Google frequent. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and naive, but if highlighting posts like these help to shift Google back even just a little towards "Don't be evil" then it was worth my upvote.

thaumaturgy 15y ago

I found something more interesting in his post: that Google has maybe been regarded still as a startup, even though they are far, far from it. "Don't be evil" seems like a motto that would guide a startup; it's hard for me to imagine any company of Google's size and position seriously trying to follow such a screed. The end of his post is perfectly salient: let's reserve our enthusiasm and defesnes and cheerleading for actual startups, which no longer include Google.

cageface 15y ago

When a single company has a record of almost everything I do online I have to hold them to a much higher standard than other companies. Arguments about Google's intentions tend to swing to the emotional because the nature of their business requires that we trust them indefinitely. And the way they've handled a handful of these issues recently signals to me that they're feeling more and more comfortable straining that trust if it suits their agenda. So the increasing frequency of these posts is, I think, barometer of the growing, gut-feeling discomfort among the geek community.

pasbesoin 15y ago
I find myself agreeing with the last sentence. Gut reaction, but it seems to be a "something doesn't smell right" moment for Google. (Whether or not such reaction belongs on HN? I don't know; for all the rational thinking in this group, intuition still seems to play a pretty strong role.)
ajross 15y ago
Arguably, it's also a barometer of Google's increasing status as the primary corporate enemy of Apple Computer, Inc. My gut tells me that if someone actually did the survey they'd find that "Google is Evil" posts and upvotes correlate less with Civil Libertarian politics than they do with the manufacturer of the poster's phone and laptop.
- marshray 15y ago
  Well, I haven't noticed that but I'm not out there in CA or an iPhone or a Mac user. The alleged Google/Apple hiring blacklist conspiracy seemed to cast them both in a pretty awful light. But the plural of "gut feeling" is not "data", it's...hmmm.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    The no poaching agreements also included Adobe, Intuit and Intel.
- stock_toaster 15y ago

kelnos 15y ago

Agreed. I was expecting to see him mention the no-employee-poaching collusion between Google, Apple, Intuit, etc. That is something that has drastically changed my opinion of Google recently. The other stuff he mentioned, not so much.

napierzaza 15y ago

Like any Google apologizing your post was upvoted reflexively. You efficiently summarized the talking points you were given.

tansey 15y ago

Hence the need for honeypots, pg. :)

kenjackson 15y ago

Well I think a lot of where Google crosses the line is becoming clearer now. For example, personalized ads in gmail. Try to opt-out of personalized ads in gmail, seriously go and try it. You can click the button, but they won't actually opt you out. At least not how you'd expect. You'll still get personalized ads, but they just use a different heuristic for how to personalize (based on the current email). How hard is it to not personalize my ads at all? It would be easy. But Google has opted to add value to advertisers over their users. This alone is one reason why I'm thinking of leaving gmail. Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it.

ramblerman 15y ago
This has been a core facet of gmail for years. You get free email + storage - they post contextual ads on the right. The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms. >> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it. Yeah... sure
- kenjackson 15y ago
  The problem people are discussing here, has nothing to do with some heuristic that runs against your email. It's the advent of the google profile, where all your online searches, mails, posts, rss feeds, and mobile phone now tie together in one place, and google is changing the terms. I'm talking about something else. I'm talking specifically about the "option" of opting out of personalized (and there is a well hidden option that Google has for this), but it only changes the algorithm. You still get personalized ads. When I signed up for GMail when it first opened, this was not the case. >> Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm seriously considering it. Yeah... sure Is this hard to believe? I just created a hotmail account. I need to try it on all my devices first. And then of course get my forwarding accounts switched to it. If all goes well I'll switch. The main concern is lack of imap so I'll use Exchange ActiveSync -- but since I don't generally use that today, I need to make sure it works fine. But there was a time when GMail was untouchable. Now its a service I can't wait to get off of.

rickmb 15y ago

It's a personal story of when someone stopped believing Google, not a deep analyses of why Google is "evil". For me Google stopped being credible when it did a 180 on net neutrality. There were good reasons before that, and there were certainly good reasons after that, but when someone or some company loses the benefit of the doubt is a personal thing. What currently pisses me off most about Google is their blatant disregard for privacy, more specifically their open and arrogant disdain for the way privacy is perceived (and protected by law) outside the US. In hindsight I "should" have started "hating" Google much earlier, and OMG, I still use Google. Doesn't make any single individual argument criticizing Google any less valid though. But most of all, the value in this post does not lie in his arguments, but in the fact that it illustrates the way in which Google is losing its supporters and its credibility as an ethical corporation.

Jgrubb 15y ago
In my humble opinion, and I apologize to any Facebook engineers who read this, but Facebook has touched off an ethical race to the bottom with regards to users, their privacy, and their information that can be sold to advertisers. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it's too bad nonetheless.
- rickmb 15y ago
  Facebook was always in the game of collecting private data and exploiting it. It's in the nature of their product, you pretty much sign up for that up front. Google offered services that didn't explicitly require users to register personal data (with some exceptions, like Orkut), and only much later started collating and exploiting all the information they gathered by observing. The latter is much creepier. It's the difference between someone asking you to fill out a form with very personal information and someone who's spying on you through binoculars. Also, Google betrayed people's trust with their whole "don't be evil" thing. Most people never trusted Facebook very much to begin with. Many of us trusted Google. Betrayal pisses people off more than just being screwed.
  - jrockway 15y ago

paganel 15y ago

One reason for which I don't like Google anymore is that they broke their primary promise, which they were emphasizing more and more around 2004-2005 (if I remember correctly): to make most of the world's information easily accessible and shareable, and, why not?, trying to make a difference in this world. In my ideal world the Wikileaks info would have lived in a Google sub-domain, climate change discussions would have been based on open charts and data which would have been also hosted by Google (with available info going back since the first meteorological observations were made), mashups about Iraq and Afghanistan wars with geo-located user-uploaded photos could have lived at maps.google.com/war and so on and so on. I know that what I was dreaming about doesn't add any stock-market value or anything (and in the worst case scenario it gets you straight into jail), but that's at least what I call "changing the world, trying to make it a better place", like guys such as Diderot or d'Alembert did three centuries ago.

jhuni 15y ago
Don't stop dreaming.

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

I think there is a lot of "hate" for Google these days, but I believe every bodies reasoning is different. This is OK, they have alienated so many of their users, but many in a different way. My current "hate" for google stems from them taking the social away from Google reader,I don't give two Sh!t$ about the policies being merged, I actually think that's a good thing. Someone else "hates" the new social merged into search. Honestly, I enjoy diversity in the services I use online. I want my music to be independent from my email to be independent from my "social network" (not to be confused with my "personal network", of which, email is a part of) I don't like what google has become, and if I wasn't firmly planted and reliant on gmail, I'd be google product free. RSS, search, and cloud storage are all now solved for me elsewhere, and social always has been. I'm sticking with gmail, because I'm not anti-google, and it's a fantastic product, but I've left google products because somethign better came along (dropbox killed any need for google docs, google killed their RSS as far as I'm concerned, and G+ never really did it for me (or any of my actual friends, although I've got thousands of followers, they're all from the HN circle...) Did I mention that I revel in diversity to keep my mind engaged and learning new things. I don't want my entire experience to be from google or facebooks window, I want wide open spaces of internet and applications. If you know what I mean. This is going to turn into a larger rant on the the course of "social media" and their networks. When I'm with certain groups of friends, I act and talk in a certain way, and by no means should some of that ever be public. I want to talk and communicate with some of the social group of mine online, but in no way shape or form should any of that be public as well. Many people can't make that distinction (hence the UK people being deported because of tweets) and I think the big companies are trying to ruin that divide between public and private.