On shitting on Google.

[Requia ☣]

Ok, I'd like to step away from the right and wrong of what Google does, and ask why Google gets shit on so much in comparison to others that do similar things.  All the major players do things like store your search info and help with censorship in China, so why does Google get shit on for that but not Microsoft of Yahoo.  Is it that Google is bigger, is it that the 'not evil' slogan tweaks people, is it that Google has a few things that are a step past what others do (like Streetview)?

[Golden Applesauce]

The 'little' things (Streetview, etc) that Google does extra, but mostly because it's bigger.

That's not an entirely bad reason, though.  It's hard(er) to stick accusations to an industry in general - for whatever reason people respond better if you put a specific example of excesses in front of them to protest at.  So mostly targeting one company might make sense for PR purposes, or might just be the way people's biases work.

And Google is the market leader - it is it the most highly visible of the other major search engines, but it got that way because it has the biggest market share (and therefore the most privacy to give away.)  But beyond that, Google sets the standard.  When Google lowers its standards, that gives a license to other companies to lower theirs, and signals consumers to not expect the same level of quality from any search provider.  In principle, that should work in reverse too - if Google takes a stand for privacy and responsibility, and showed that it was possible to be an industry megapower without whoring out your customer's data, I wouldn't be surprised if the other companies followed suit.

Don't forget the "Don't be evil" motto.  As far as I know, Google is alone of the email/search giants of even admitting that taking advantage of your customers ventures into evil.  They've claimed to hold themselves to a higher standard, and it is entirely appropriate for the public to hold them to that higher standard as well.  The fact that they wantonly ignore it whenever profitable makes them not just jerks but hypocritical jerks.

[Captain Utopia]

We tribalize everything.  We also like balance.  Sometimes the numbers balance out pretty much (left wing/right wing politics).  Sometimes lower numbers are more extreme in their views which help balance out a larger, more passive, tribe.

I could start a thread about how much I love muffins, and the first page could be filled with others expressing their muffin-love.  By page 2, you'd have either a big troll or a bunch of people saying how they're not really keen on muffins.  "Oh, they're not quite as healthy as they advertise themselves",  "They're usually stale and greasy",  "muffin-tops are too hard to take off in one go", etc.  Blessed balance.

Google is a big issue.  And you always need to pick a side on big issues, don't you?

You can justify your support/hatred in any combination of a million different ways.. but it'd be surprised if the root of it all diverged very far from that basic monkey tribal principle.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Microsoft doesn't get shit on? 

[Captain Utopia]

Maybe I'm in the wrong geek-circles, but not nearly as much as it used to.  Windows 7 seems to actually be a decent OS, I've only heard good things about .Net development, visual studio has some annoying quirks but for the most part I find it excellent whenever I have to use it (rarely).  Business-practice wise, they're just not as relevant as they used to be (or as they think they still are).  Bear in mind that this is coming from a full-time linux/embedded systems developer who used to hate Microsoft with unspeakable passion going back to the early 90s when I was a fanatical Amiga user.

[Requia ☣]

Microsoft doesn't get shit on?  

Point  

I mean that they don't get shit on for the same things.  At first I thought it was because there are so many other things to shit on MS over.  People are so busy shitting on Microsoft for shady dealings with the standards boards and suing people for using Linux that they run out of time before they get to Microsoft giving its search records to the US gov.  But then why no Yahoo! hate?

[Captain Utopia]

Relevance?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Since Google is the big dog, shitting on them is shitting on the rest by proxy.

[Captain Utopia]

Reminds me of the world-cup mentality - "Hey Joe - your team lost, therefore you suck by proxy, haha."

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Reminds me of the world-cup mentality - "Hey Joe - your team lost, therefore you suck by proxy, haha."

Not quite what I meant. Kind of along the same lines that since Google leads, any changes they make, others will make.

[Captain Utopia]

Microsoft and Yahoo didn't follow Google in pulling out of China.

But I agree in the sense that if you put up a negative story about Google, it would probably get a lot more attention than if the exact same story had been about Yahoo!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

We can't really shit on something that's not in the toilet. We can fling shit at it, but that's definitely a different dynamic from shitting on it. We're on the other side of the bars, screeching and flinging poop.

[Triple Zero]

Ok, I'd like to step away from the right and wrong of what Google does, and ask why Google gets shit on so much in comparison to others that do similar things.  All the major players do things like store your search info and help with censorship in China, so why does Google get shit on for that but not Microsoft of Yahoo.  Is it that Google is bigger, is it that the 'not evil' slogan tweaks people, is it that Google has a few things that are a step past what others do (like Streetview)?

for me, it's because Google is a LOT bigger.

and because Google goes WAY beyond what others do, which is in part related to them being a lot bigger, even if they did just the same things.

additionally, it's not just the "not evil" slogan [which they don't carry anymore], but the general hypocrisy and basically their whole air of being unapproachable and untouchable.

then there's the whole thing of feeling cheated. Google used to have this bright shiny image of being a fun happy smart corporation doing awesome stuff and not fucking the public over. remember that? they used to be the embodiement of the crazy dotcom bubble with private cooks and "20% time" all the perks.

but slowly the plastic bubblewrap started to melt, burn and stink and a rotting corporate zombie started to show below their clean surface.

it is that popularity, this image, that needs to be absolutely crushed. people still think Google is somehow different or better from all the other big information corps.

it needs to be shown that they are just as bad as any other faceless corporation.

except even more so, because they are the biggest by an order of magnitude. as well as not even having a human face.

in addition to that, they are STILL growing, and STILL working on even bigger and more privacy breaching projects than you've seen so far. Wave and Buzz seem to have flopped, which I count as a small victory. It's not good to give all that power and digital territory to one corporation.

[Buzz already made the same privacy fuckups that gave Facebook such a bad rep, overnight setting feeds to public, adding the entire GMail contact list as "friends" etc]

it's not only what they have done so far, it is also what I KNOW they will do if they are not stopped. StreetView may be the summum of public privacy breachings right now, but that is right now, and they won't stop there.

You can tell by their current mission statement, which is no longer "don't be evil", but the goal to index and make searchable all information in the world.

And that's scary and dangerous, when such a gigantic megacorp as Google is doing it, and succeeding.

And all the while having a happy shiny public imago.

(which is crumbling somewhat, but imagine if it wasn't. that is whey they need to be shat upon)

Yahoo does also bad things, but at least they're not pretending to be something they are not. They are also not as big as Google. And in fact, if the whole privacy fucking would be spread out more evenly among an ecosystem of different search and information corps, it would be a lot less of a problem. (because they would never share databases with eachother)

And Microsoft. I don't even know why you bring them up. They got their share of shit years ago, with the Windows monopoly anti-trust shit, and the browser selection screen more recently. Everybody was shitting on them, even those who didn't know what they were talking about [that last category mostly because their computers bluescreened too often, I guess].

After that, Microsoft failed. It lost battles to Google as well as Apple. BTW Imagine ten years ago, someone predicting MS would compete with Google. An OS/software firm competing with a website? Ridiculous! Microsoft didn't see that one coming either, not soon enough.

And yes I've seen their (TED?) presentation on what they're trying to do with their version of StreetView. It's way ambitious. Technically incredibly interesting. In fact, Microsoft Research is pretty damn fucking awesome [years ago I talked to one of their researchers from Cambridge, he said all the smart MS Researchers used Firefox, of course ].
Of course, if they had the monopoly they used to have, or the power that Google had right now, I'd be all up in arms against them. But I know now that MS is a crippled dinosaur right now. Left arm doesn't get what the right arm is doing. A real telling example is the refusal of the MS Office software development department refusing to incorporate user-interface features proposed by the Mobile OS / touchscreen UI research team. Result is of course what you see today, Apple and Google ruling the mobile computing industry, and a version of MS Office (or even Windows Mobile) that never worked smoothly on touchscreen interfaces.

Microsoft is the perfect example of an oldskool corporation paralyzed by their bureaucracy.

Fortunately their tech teams poop out some amazing stuff, especially the SeaDragon and DeepZoom technologies are brilliant. Remember those TED talks? The most brilliant part of it was when they hooked up those technologies to Flickr's location data. That would also have been SCARY AS FUCK if they pulled that off. FORTUNATELY the Flickr database is owned by Yahoo, so MS couldn't use it for commercial purposes, just for demonstrating the technology. And from this simple ecosystem variety, our privacy wins out.

I gotta admit, I lost track of Yahoo for a littlebit [even though I use their services. Pipes was pretty cool, if useless. Their search APIs are more open and easier to use than Google's, but yeah]. I'm not entirely aware of what they are up to. But they're not as big as Google.



So to sum it up, why am I shitting on Google?

I would always shit on the biggest one. (unless they're really not evil, but they always are)

And BECAUSE they are (by FAR) the biggest one, whatever privacy breaching stuff they do is orders of magnitudes worse than what anybody else can do.

And don't get me wrong, I would and will shit on Microsoft and Yahoo if what they were doing got anywhere near what Google is doing. But they don't, currently. And even though Yahoo manages to stay out of the picture on some of the things they do, which are bad, they don't pretend and they don't do it over the entire range, like Google does.

And also what Twiddle said. Shitting on the big dog Google, shits on the smaller dogs by proxy. By which I mean, if we make a really big stink out of every "little thing" Google is doing, Yahoo will also get the message that it should thread carefully. Which really seems to have some effect, btw.


Additionally, remember when Altavista was the big and most popular search engine? It's about time some other search engine took the lead again.

Currently I would propose Duck Duck Go. It does about the same things as Google, has a couple of nifty features, and most importantly has our privacy built in from the start.

But even I use Google for any quick search I need to do. Wanna know why? Because their servers are everywhere, and I get my answer in hallf a second:

1.40 sec http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=golden+apple+seed
1.84 sec http://www.bing.com/search?q=golden+apple+seed&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all
2.74 sec http://www.cuil.com/search?q=golden+apple+seed
5.04 sec http://nl.search.yahoo.com/search?p=golden%20apple%20seed&ei=UTF-8&fr=opera2
6.21 sec https://duckduckgo.com/?q=golden+apple+seed

I used my stopwatch to time from hitting Enter (straight from the address bar, not their frontpage, cause that's not how I search) until I saw the results on the screen.

I didn't know Bing was so fast. That's a real big plus for me, I might give Bing a few tries in the future.

And maybe if I feel inspired later today I will write a python script to repeatedly test a couple of random queries for more significance. Although that will not be entirely accurate because it would not load the CSS and images and whatever JS is trying to load.




Then a question to you, Requia. Why do you care so much? Because I really feel I have been stating nothing but the obvious here. Nothing that your smart brain couldnt have figured out for yourself. Or are you testing to see if my motivations are clean?

Cause I really don't get it. See, now if I was entirely wrong about exposing the evils of Google, I could understand your constant arguing. But the fact of the matter is that I am not. Even you should be able to see that, and the only things you get to argue about are constantly pointing out that some things might be hyperbole, and that other less significant corporations are doing the same things [except on a smaller scale and not all of them at once].

[Captain Utopia]

Do you want to know why I dig the "Don't be evil" motto of Google?  Because it's like having a constitution, the point is not that by having it you'll never err, but that it provides a perpetual goal to work towards.  I think it's also the reason why, when they realised that they'd accidentally captured a measly 1gb of wifi data, they owned up to it rather than simply deleting it.  Now it's entirely possible that senior management didn't have a choice, and it was a lower-level employee who had drunk the "Don't be evil" kool-aid and threatened to blow the whistle.  Regardless, they made the right choice.

For me, it's a bit like this.  By aiming high, and by creating a positive public image, they raise the bar and get closer to the "fun happy smart" ideal than they otherwise might have done.

And their core mission is not "to index and make searchable all information in the world", but "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".  It's been this ever since Google was just a bunch of motherboards duct-taped into a cardboard box.  Why is this a bad goal?  If information is universally accessible, then what does it matter whose servers it resides on?

And all the while having a happy shiny public imago.

(which is crumbling somewhat, but imagine if it wasn't. that is whey they need to be shat upon)

So I see this and I don't see someone trying to keep a company true to its stated goals and beliefs, but someone shitting on a company because it has the apparent audacity to try to become something better than that which has come before it.

[Requia ☣]

Then a question to you, Requia. Why do you care so much? Because I really feel I have been stating nothing but the obvious here. Nothing that your smart brain couldnt have figured out for yourself. Or are you testing to see if my motivations are clean?

I'm pretty sure I mentioned all the things you did in my op or in my response to Nigel.  I'm more curious which of the motives is the trigger (the answer apparently being, all of them).