

Google is polluting the internet - yarapavan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/30/google-polluting-internet

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cheald
Ugh, sensationalist crap. Yes, advertising on search engines is potentially
corrupting. It is not necessarily a foregone conclusion, and I think that
Google has avoided "being evil" in regards to ads in their search results, for
the most part.

The really disingenuous part of this article is that Google does not own a
monopoly on information, or information indexing. Nobody is "allowing" them to
control information indexing; it's just good enough that there hasn't been a
compelling need for an alternative. In fact, the author draws a parallel
between public libraries and search engines - yeah, the government controlling
our information indexes on the taxpayers' dime without any incentive to
actually provide good results or to improve upon the system is _obviously_ a
better solution.

The author, or anyone here, or some kid in his parents' basement is more than
free to create their own completely open, free, self-funded information
indexer (see: DuckDuckGo!). The problem, of course, is that Google provides
much better, more complete, more comprehensive, more useful results for the
vast majority of information indexing, because of the ridiculous amount of
money and talent they've invested into solving these problems. As nice as the
idea is, the world doesn't run on nice thoughts and good intentions - at the
end of the day, that brilliant engineer that figured out how to return your
search results 0.03 sec faster has to feed his family.

Advertising in a search engine isn't inherently evil; it's _dangerous_ ,
because advertisers will want to buy the first search results, and will often
pay well for that privilege. The temptation of that offer is strong, but
honestly? Google's big enough at this point that they've proved that they can
be enormously profitable without having to sacrifice result quality. If
anything, Google has made advertising more useful to me as a consumer, rather
than allowing advertising to degrade my end-user experience. Google is
successful because they've delivered consistently useful results, and then
attached advertising to it, not because they've delivered advertised results
and then the actually useful stuff 2/3's of a page later.

I eagerly await the author's new, open, free-to-use, ad-free, as-good-and-
fast-as-Google search engine. I'll use it if he'll deliver it, but he'll be
too busy Googling quotes for his next article to make that happen.

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socratees
A different perspective - but definitely worth being analyzed. What do you
think?

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drivebyacct2
Nooo. That's why Google became successful. They focused on providing relevant
results. If they were a commercialized search engine then they'd be no better
than the yellow pages.

Their ads supplement their amazing results.

