Google is FUBAR

Yes there is a huge market building for somone who can offer something better than what Google is becoming (albeit slowly).

Was Google looking to profit from the fall of AltaVista back then?

I doubt it.

I think they just had an idea of how they do search better. They took out the advertising and the influence of payments on ranking. AdSense came much later. The Google of today is different than the one that provided a better alternative to AV.

Given the direction Google is taking (obsessively competing for unsavvy Facebook users), they are giving me and no doubt others lots of ideas of how we can do search better.

Keep on Google. If this is what you want.

Yes, me too!

> I don't see these as divergent.

Not divergent in the sense that one precludes the other, but where one doesn't involve me, the other is all about me. The old Google cared only about my search terms, the new Google seems to want to climb in my bed with a notepad and figure me all out.

> Does Google have to not be evil in the eyes of every one of its employees?

Google, the institution, just has not to be evil, as they have defined evil. That there's obvious internal disquet about their new direction should be fairly disqueting to you.

> Could you describe in what ways you think Google is building an institution that leads them inevitably toward doing evil?

It doesn't matter how many websites Google crawl or books they digitise, we don't have to trust them or their intentions or any of their staff. But our personal information can be used both for us and against us, and it's eventual misuse is inevitable whether by the institution, corrupt agents within it, or parties outside of it. The only thing we can do is limit the potential damage by limiting the data they hold on us.

> Maybe the part I don't understand is what lies at the bottom of the personal data mine.

That's part of the problem, I don't think anyone does really. We're in uncharted territory and part of the reason it's so tricky is so much can be inferred about you from seemingly innocuous data, or from analysing your social graph.

> Is it a matter of how much data they collect? What they do with the data?

Well they have a loosely defined need which is pushing them to collect this data. It seems fairly benign; to improve search. But where does it end? Larry Page doesn't seem to have drawn a line anywhere. Once they have the data and it's been mined for further meaning, it's inevitable they'll find new uses for it. So one leads to the other, leading back to the first.

Google is staffed by thousands of very clever people. I don't want them spending their days trying to figure me out. They're not uncorruptible. It's bad enough Facebook is at it; we really don't need Google competing with them in this endeavor. If we allow the situation to get out of hand, the winner will be the company that holds the most complete portfolio of information on us. Are you comfortable with that?

Could you point me to the obvious internal disquiet? Is this in reference to Larry Page's supposed "ultimatum"? Because I was under the impression that that was a simple expression of his commitment to his vision for the company, misrepresented by a hostile media entity.

It seems to me that the bulk of your objection boils down to Google's continued and expanding collection of personal data, and an impending but vaguely characterized misuse of that data.

> That's part of the problem, I don't think anyone does really. We're in uncharted territory and part of the reason it's so tricky is so much can be inferred about you from seemingly innocuous data, or from analysing your social graph.

I generally find warnings about vague, ill-defined threats to be unconvincing.

> Once they have the data and it's been mined for further meaning, it's inevitable they'll find new uses for it.

This does not seem at all self-evident to me.

In fact, it seems to me that Google's incentives are such that it's pretty much in their interest to use the data well. They have no incentive to sell it, since it allows them to target search results and ads better. And they have every incentive to keep their users' trust. And as far as I can tell, they've taken the issue pretty seriously. The Google Buzz disclosure incident is the only accidental exposure of information I can remember, and they handled it pretty well.

Here's the rub - for a given query there is no such thing as the list of link that are "most relevant". Different people will have (potentially widely) divergent opinions on what the most relevant set of links are for the exact same query.

The goal Google web-search [1] is to show you the links from the whole web that are most relevant to you. Knowing more about you allows a search engine to make better decisions about what links are relevant to you.

You would be hard pressed to find an engineer at Google that thinks search is remotely close to a "solved" problem.

([1] for the cynics - yes, Google makes a lot of money from showing ads on search result pages. That is a nice effect of having a great search engine. Making money isn't the goal of web-search. Showing relevant results is. That was true when Larry and Sergey were cobbling together machines in their dorm room. It is still true today)