It’s often said that bad news travels fast, and so it is with Google. The company that uses the informal motto “Don’t Be Evil” has found itself under a lot a scrutiny in the past year especially from privacy groups. Recently there have been reports that the Google Toolbar continues to send browser information even after it’s been disabled. The company has also faced a lot of criticism from publishers and copyright holders for its Google Books venture.
At the same time though, they do continue to roll out useful – and usually free – new tools for people to use. The video above is from their Webmaster Central video series and contains a good recap of some of the positive things that Google has done for users, developers and webmasters over the last year, some of which might have passed you by.
Unfortunately, the one that is of most interest to me right now, Social Search, is a Google Labs experiment that I can’t get access to yet.
[On a side note, it's interesting that the video is available in 360P, 480P, 720P and 1080P, so YouTube are definitely going for TV integration at long last.]
So, where do you stand on the Google Are Good / Google Are Evil debate? Do you mind that one company knows so much about you and your habits, or do you just enjoy the benefits of their services? Let us know in the comments below.
I don’t think they’re either good or evil. Well they are good… at business, that’s why their dominating web search, ppc advertising and I guess cloud apps. Basically I think they’re going to do to Microsoft, on a smaller scale, the same thing Microsoft did to IBM. One of the reasons I’ve moved to GAE from Asp.NET.
People say Microsoft are evil, they’re not. Again they’re just really good at business.
Although Google do have an awful lot of data that’s literaly worth billions (much like twitter). So I’m suspect of them too, but no more suspect than I would be of any large multi-national.
Hi Phil
I suspect that Philip was being a bit flippant in his original article and on the whole I agree with your sentiments. Google are starting to dominate in areas that no one thought they would because they are good.
However the purpose of having companies at all is so that they can create value. At some point in market dominance they become so controlling that they can start to profit solely from their dominance and not from created value.
Now ‘evil’ is a pretty emotive word and probably shouldn’t be used. However, I don’t think anyone would applaud a dominant market player using illegal methods to bully other players out the market. This is something that seems to happen with profound regularity when companies reach the level of market dominance that Microsoft, Intel or Google has.