
Don't be Google - chris-at
http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/01
======
jdbernard
So how are "page ranking, search results, and cached data" inherently evil?
These are some of the basic services that make the web as we know it work.
Also, energy consumption? My understanding is that they were doing quite a lot
to meet their needs with renewable sources[1][2]. I hardly think that
qualifies as evil.

Sure, there are times and issues we can point to where Google has failed their
motto. You could make an argument that their mission to "organize the world's
information" _is_ evil when it is carried to it's logical extreme, or at least
empowers evil. But this comic is not making those points. It's just grabbing a
bunch of old headlines, some of which aren't even relevant.

Though I confess I never really "got" Doonesbury. It's rarely accurate enough
to pass as a political cartoon and rarely funny enough for the funny pages.

[1]:
[http://www.google.com/green/energy/](http://www.google.com/green/energy/)

[2]: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/20/us-google-
windpowe...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/20/us-google-windpower-
idUSTRE66J3BL20100720)

~~~
lmm
Advertising is inherently evil, and Google is an advertising company first and
foremost (it's where the vast majority of their revenue comes from, after
all).

~~~
cm2012
You realize that of all advertising methods, Google's is probably the least
evil? "Searching for a product? Here is that product sold by a large variety
of competitors."

~~~
seertaak
That's not the evil part. The evil part is how they appropriate, to varying
degrees, the works of content creators, and then sell advertising on top.

~~~
cm2012
It is trivial to tell Google not to index your work if you don't want them to.

------
billynomates1
Putting the punchline in the title totally ruined this.

~~~
rushabh
Yeah, the title should just be "Don't be Evil"

------
afarrell
Google is 15 years old with almost 50,000 current employees. Of course it has
done evil things. Now, don't know of a coherent widely agreed-upon definition
of evil, but once you get to that scale, there is enough human behavior going
on that some of it will be evil for pretty much any definition.

The lack of a widely agreed-upon definition of evil is a problem for Google
though. That word gets thrown around enough that "don't be evil", really only
means "Don't use 'we're a for-profit corporation' as an excuse to do something
egregious."

------
throwaway283719
If you're going to link to a comic with a joke in it, don't put the punchline
in the title of the submission!

------
zatkin
Google is also evil with their AdSense banning[1].

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672910)

