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I still do lots of image searches. I wonder if those are also heavily influenced by ads now.
With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads. A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png
For branded keywords, it's not just shady, it's racketeering. You wouldn't want your competitor to show up first when someone searches for your brand, would you? Then pay up. E.g. https://i.imgur.com/SfomkdQ.png ; the second result is a competitor's ad, the third result is the organic result.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/antitrust-hear...
In retrospect, I'm sure blurring the lines between ads and search results was probably part of the motivation. But if they modified ads a bit more to further distinguish them and kept the favicons, I don't think I'd mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
Evil is also subjective.
The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals.
I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my opponent in this game[1]. And I suspect if the average user understood the implications of Google serving advertisers and not them, they'd be on my side, and not on Google's side.
In this framework, good and evil are just shorthand for shared goals. When someone says "Google is evil" they are saying "Google doesn't share our goals," and when they say "Google is good" they are saying "Google shares our goals". Of course, within this framework, the speaker is assuming that the listener has the same goals as the speaker, which is likely not a rational assumption.
But that assumption makes sense, because the goal here isn't actually to communicate, it's to persuade, and there's a good chance that when the listener hears "Google is evil" they will come up with their own goals that Google doesn't align with, and create an alliance with the speaker based on those goals even if they don't actually align with the speakers goals. In short: good and evil are sophist rhetoric, designed to persuade through soft power[2] rather than communicate meaning.
Of course, saying good and evil are subjective is also sophist rhetoric, because you aren't actually communicating about shared goals, you're just trying to undercut the argument that "Google is good" or "Google is evil".
I'll be careful to add that calling something "sophist rhetoric" isn't equivalent to calling it "evil" at any level, because we're operating in the framework where good and evil don't exist, so sophist rhetoric can't be evil. So if you're trying to persuade, there's no reason to think that sophist rhetoric is somehow beneath you.
But since I think people actually share my goals, playing the good and evil game is a poor choice for me, so I reject the whole framework of good and evil here. Anyone who uses these words, even to say they're subjective, is trying to sell you snake oil, because if they were actually being honest they would talk about how the thing they are arguing about aligns with your goals, because that's always a stronger argument.
So I'd suggest that if you actually believe good and evil are subjective, you make your argument based on what you think isn't subjective. Otherwise we can just discard your opinion as non-informative sophist rhetoric.
On the other hand, since most people actually do have goals they would consider to be part of a moral code, and we can objectively describe what most people would call good or evil, good and evil work just fine as shorthand, sophist rhetoric aside. If, for example, we can agree that we want to be able to differentiate between ads and search results, then we can agree to call that feature "good" and we can agree to call not having that feature "evil". If you don't agree to that terminology, it's because you don't share our goals, so why should we care? Go away, advertiser, we don't want you here. ;)
This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
[1] Using "game" in a game-theoretical sense here.
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…
Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine: > "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. " ( http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html ) At th…
They follow up on that thought: > 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've built browsers, standards, protocols, libraries, and frameworks for the web. They've contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN.
And we're all poorer for it. They have taken a public service and molded into something that makes money for them and only for them. And all the while (maybe gradually) they've masqueraded as some benevolent philanthropy. The day "don't be evil" came off their motto is the day they conceded they are evil. At least as evil as any publicly trading company has to be.
And despite the frequent misinformation, "Don't be evil" has never once left their code of conduct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
read. more. tech. history. You have no idea how furious your comment made me.
They've built browsers, standards, protocols, libraries, and frameworks for the web. They've contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN.
I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out. This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google…