The Thought Salesman

Well, my blog has been neglected lately, and has seemed to focus on my fight to create a Men’s Resource Centre (which has received negative criticism by the SFUO members, individual sexists, and people who disapprove of me calling out people with sexist attitudes), so today’s blog will focus on the internet’s user-friendliest search engine, Google.

What I’d like to focus on is Google’s motto. “Don’t be Evil” is the unofficial motto of Google, and actually came about from an exasperated joke at a company meeting. Basically, a Google engineer, Paul Buchheit, at a corporate meeting blurted it out, and seeing as Google was looking for a slogan that would imply that they wouldn’t sacrifice long term profits for short term profits, it was chosen.

For the most part, Google is a fairly benign corporate entity. Their software does not try to take over your computer like Quicktime, or Java, or RealPlayer. They provide a secure service that doesn’t load your computer with adware, or spyware, and are free of pop-ups. In terms of advertising, their Google AdSense provides start-up bloggers and web designers with some break-even income. Their G-mail was the first E-mail service that provided users with 1 gigabyte of storage, and Google Video wasn’t that bad even before it was pretty much phased out in favour of YouTube.

Providing the good services they do, for free, has a very positive passive effect on the internet. Anybody who has set up a hotmail account could attest to this. Microsoft, possibly Google’s biggest competitor is a company that certainly does not espouse a philosophy of “Don’t be Evil.” Their Hotmail accounts were free, but filled with ads, had a tiny storage space and required quite a lot of money to upgrade to an account with larger space and less ads. Basically, Microsoft set up a series of services, all doing the same thing, but with varying degrees of quality, even though they had the power, with relatively little loss, to make every facet of their Hotmail service high quality.

The poor received poor service.

Along came Google, giving away 1 gigabyte, relatively ad-free G-mail accounts to everyone. Without this push, I doubt Hotmail would have improved for those who could not afford it.

In this sense, Google upheld its motto, by not discriminating between the rich and the poor.

However, Google is not squeaky clean. In 2006 Google reached an agreement with China to allow Google search engine service in China. Google agreed to censor its search results to fall in line with the oppressive ruling regime’s thought censorship policies. Google justified this decision by stating that censored search engine services are better than no search engine services. Of course, China already has search engine services like BaiDu, which are very similar to Google. Google’s response was a very thin veneer for simply being greedy.

Due to this incident, Google changed its model of ethical conduct to an “evil scale.” It appears that the morals of any corporation are fluid and very flexible, even those of Google.

Also, Google saves the search requests of its users for 2 years. Many organisations, including the EU have asked Google to justify this. They, to date, have not.

So, decide this one for yourselves, Google seems to avoid price gouging it’s clients whenever possible, which certainly does make for a rare example of corporate ethical behaviour. However, they do help widen the oppression of the Chinese, and they are keeping information on your searches without expressly informing you of it, and being a giant corporation, I would question the harmlessness of this act.

To me, it seems that Google is like a young child. It tries to be good, but can’t be expected to go out of it’s way to do anything altruistic.