
Google has 'outgrown' its 14-year old mission statement, says Larry Page - Libertatea
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-page-google-dont-be-evil-sergey-brin
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daveloyall
I would go so far as to suggest that this link be ignored and this one be
viewed instead:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8539114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8539114)

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Zigurd
How about "Enable knowledge of good and evil."

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camillomiller
With its Search products Google is already shaping the Western World views and
culture in subtle ways not everybody's noticing. In doing that, almost always
in a purely algorithmic way without human intervention, the "evil" threshold
has been passed many times. Again, without anyone really noticing. In other
words, it was an old motto already.

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api
I'd consider it far more evil if it were _with_ human intervention.

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tonyplee
It is always with human intervention - whoever controls the ranking algorithm
controls the display results. That's power of Google. Simple change of ranking
algorithm can drop some website's traffic by 80%-90% for good or bad.

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dsugarman
when you so vastly outgrow your mission statement, antitrust issues are likely
present

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jgilliam
The Guardian's headline is very misleading. Google's mission statement is not
"don't be evil" \- it's "to organise the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful."

Larry Page is clearly referring to the mission statement that may need to
change, not "Don't be evil." This is all made very clear in the original FT
article The Guardian cites, they just chose to go for a more inaccurate and
salacious framing of the entire story.
[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3173f19e-5fbc-11e4-8c27-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3173f19e-5fbc-11e4-8c27-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3I1Ga58zO)

[edit: the guardian changed the headline!]

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pmontra
"Don't be evil" is the corporate motto
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil)
That's a very difficult motto to change. Removing it would mean "we're free to
do evil now" and that won't be received well. Anyway, I wonder if is there
anyone left who thinks Google is still faithful to their motto.

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curun1r
> Removing it would mean "we're free to do evil now"

It's a subtle distinction, but the motto is "don't be evil", not "don't do
evil." The former allows you to do evil things in service to noble purposes.
For example, "don't do evil" would have required the company to shut down
services rather than sharing information with the NSA. "Don't be evil" allowed
them to balance that evil action against the good created by those services to
realize a net-positive societal benefit from offering those services.

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hawkice
Perhaps a better example: Censorship in Google China. The "don't do evil" vs
"don't be evil" was almost exactly how they pitched that conversation.

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wavefunction
Doing evil is being evil. End of discussion.

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gtremper
Well, everyone is evil then.

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Kiro
> This article previously stated that “don’t be evil” was part of Google’s
> mission statement, and has been corrected.

Change the title.

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jeremyjarvis
Are they now actively planning on being evil?

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rl3
Considering their recent acquisitions on the cutting edge of robotics and
artificial intelligence research, I certainly hope not.

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porter
It's like trying to figure out a new mission after you've already taken over
the world. What the heck comes after that?

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fidotron
They really haven't taken over the world, but they have run out of relatively
low hanging fruit to attack.

As gets pointed out a lot, their fundamental problem is an allergy to business
models which involve humans in the workflow, and this will continue to be
their problem as they simply haven't learned how to deal with people properly.

