
Don't Trust Google (2002) - kryptiskt
http://idlewords.com/2002/12/don_t_trust_google.htm
======
TeMPOraL
And 14 years later there still _" is no evidence or even reason to suspect
that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the
rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven’t heard of anyone
being arrested for running a dodgy query."_

So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the
penultimate paragraph, it's been more than a decade and those fears haven't
really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being
said in anti-Google threads in 2014.

~~~
angularfan
Here's a few ways the post became true:

Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for
Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the
public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements
to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing
the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for
Education data.
[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html)

Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft
used to. [http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-
la...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-
motorola-Samsung)

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without
properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable
the tracking. [http://digiday.com/platforms/google-
tracking/](http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/)

Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has
fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against
someone at Google reading your email? [http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-
google-engineer-stalked-tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-
engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats)

Paid inclusion for shopping search results [http://marketingland.com/once-
deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...](http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-
google-now-embraces-paid-inclusion-13138)

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches
for Yelp [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-
outranked-...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-
google-local-listings/111539/)

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older
people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that
almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus
forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

[http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-
intentional...](http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-
intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/)
[http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-
practice-i...](http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is-
deceptive.html/?a=viewall)

~~~
ukimoo
I'm sure you're aware that this collection of yours pertains to complaints of
interested parties, and that if you'd bothered with any follow-through on
these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture.

But seeing as you had a cherry picked list of the harshest (and incomplete)
reportings at the ready, augmented with you're own slanted commentary my guess
is that a "full picture" isn't what you're aiming for here.

~~~
ntakasaki
>if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have
encountered a very different picture

Why don't you expound on that very different picture instead of such a hand
wavy kneejerk dismissal without any reasoning or references?

------
richardw
Got an android tablet for 94 year-old grandma a week ago. To simplify her
experience I turned off most services she doesn't need. Every time I visit,
Google has hoodwinked her into switching something on. Location services,
Google+, Google now. She only wants mail and pics. Yesterday I got her an iPad
because Apple just makes money on the devices and doesn't spin their BS web of
ad-based services at grandma.

From an ex Google absolute fanboy writing this on a Nexus. They used to be an
example of open trustworthy behaviour. Now they're just another company to me.
The ultimate 'you're the product' company at that, and I dislike that phrase.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm not going to comment on the horrifying way you seem to throw money
around...

I am however going to comment on the absurdity of how you seem to protest this
whole situation. If she only wants mail and pics, why not get rid of all the
other junk that comes pre-installed and put in a generic mail and a generic
pics app?

Do you think the situation will be any better on ipad, which is running on a
platform that is twenty times as closed as android?

~~~
richardw
Luckily I had backup plans for the Android, in case she didn't want to use it
:) It was a test machine to see if she could even begin to find it useful, and
I assumed it'd probably be good enough because hey, they're all the same these
days.

That's the reason why I chose Android in the first place, assuming I could set
the launcher and just make it dead-simple. I did a week or two of research
looking into apps that might suit an old-timer. Big Launcher is great, but
doesn't fix Skype because Skype's UI is a nightmare (contacts + favorites +
recent? really? she has about four people she'd Skype. Why are the video/etc
buttons so tiny? Yes obviously that issue will be on iPad as well.) Tried a
couple photos apps to see which was best. Tried a couple mail apps. Get PPS
from daughter, have to find tiny buttons to move to next slide of cat, rather
than just swiping, so app closes and she misses half the pics. I've found
websites dedicated to the elderly but none that seem to clear the whole mess
up. While trying to do this, I'm listening to her talking to Google because
she clicking something and Google says "Talk now", so she's telling it she
can't find her email. They put in a quad-core processor so battery dies in no
time. The Google tells me the mini has better battery life.

Home button disappears sometimes (e.g. camera, or Solitaire game) and replaced
by tiny dot (so you want to go home but can't, or at least can't find it).
iPad, it's always there - the physical round thing. Sometimes she touches the
home/back buttons when typing (closes game or mail, very surprised - so now
you don't want to go home but do), and iPad doesn't have soft buttons below
the space bar. Send button is very close to the menu on Android. On iPad there
are only two buttons and they're far from each other. Just above the home
button Google has the "all apps" button, which she just doesn't need front-
and-center. Back button sometimes does X, sometimes does Y, depending on
context. Small USB cable works one-way only, iPad's can be inserted both ways.
On this device can't remove the Google search bar near the top (I think?) and
she's not quite ready for the web yet. Or Google's voice thing that didn't
help her. At some point I need to take her off Google+ because she doesn't
need any alerts that some random person is now following her. That shit is not
in the user's best interests, it's in Google's. Then she's building up a great
set of drafts because she'll edit and hit the wrong thing and it'll be gone,
whereas the iPad app asks "Delete Draft? Save Draft?" when you click cancel.
AFAIKT you can only hit "Send", "Cancel" or the hardware home button while
writing a mail. Nothing else goes wrong.

Please don't assume your ten seconds on the problem has shown me to be an
idiot. If you find a perfect setup, please tell me.

Btw her daughter and granddaughter both have iPads which helps the support
situation greatly because they know what the button does. And shops currently
have specials on the older non-retina, which is fine for her. We'll try it out
and if she finds the Android better given her extra week of usage, that's a
useful experiment. The money is very secondary compared to finding an
experience that makes an old lady happy that she can "write letters to her
friends". It's a game changer and she's enjoying it despite frustrations.

Current annoyance is that the toolbar icons on iPad can't grow with the fonts.
Yes can use the Zoom but that's a bit crap. Will test it with her.

------
kephra
> I have one idea for how to do that, through a network of peer-to-peer search
> engines, and I hope to post it soon.

This was 2002 ... Is there any follow up posting on it?

I'm actively developing a censor free distributed search engine, with the
abilities to parse the layout of a page into fields like author, title, date,
abstract, article, pictures. The system is able to login into sites, hide
itself as a normal browser to scrap the dark side of the web. Nodes and leafs
of the network will communicate with tor (nyi), and act like a torrent of
search engines.

Use the /chat/ or contact from my homepage, if you want to discuss my vision
of a Google killer.

~~~
dublinben
Have you seen YaCy? It's a distributed search engine project that's been
running for several years. You can start using it to search and crawl right
now.

[http://yacy.net/en/](http://yacy.net/en/)

------
stock_toaster
Something like 5 out of the first 16 comments on this post were all from
accounts (1 each) created under 1 hour ago. Weird.

~~~
ChuckMcM
It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put
their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can
be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at
Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very
little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker
always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real
money.

So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to
support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new
accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting
is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra
layer of anonymity.

~~~
pmiller2
> Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that
> translates into real money.

Wow. Did you actually see first hand anyone who was punished by Google for
things said outside the workplace? And did this extend to topics other than
Google?

~~~
yuhong
I remember some of michaelochurch's comments that mentioned Steve Yegge at
Google:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017446)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462217)

~~~
kllrnohj
Who, you will note, did _NOT_ get in trouble for his public stuff according to
michaelochurch's posts.

~~~
yuhong
Yes, but michaelochurch's point was about why.

------
twsted
"[...] what would you do if Google required you to set up a user account, or
enroll in a service [...] so that you could have more ‘personalized’ search
results, and the occasional special offer?"

Um...

~~~
TeMPOraL
Key word: _required_.

------
dkarapetyan
This is incredibly prescient but then again Harry S. Truman said a long time
ago "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". It seems
that all corporations travel the same historically beaten path.

------
throwawayads
Once a company has too much power, the physics of corporations states that it
will be abused: [https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-
trick...](https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-
trick-27baf5983516)

------
aman_abhishk
I wrote about this last year. Somewhat similar.
[http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-
faith-i...](http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-faith-in-
dont-be-evil-and-why-we-need-a)

------
yuhong
Personally I do think Google is not perfect but I never liked things such as
Scroogled.

~~~
Istof
using a service like scroogle might help to avoid local/targeted search
results (which I don't like most of the time)

~~~
yuhong
I am talking about the campaign.

------
tillywilly
Seems like recently these anti-Google posts are being dredged up at a
noticeable rate. Is there a reason behind it or is all just ad hoc?

For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

~~~
antocv
Thanks to Google these links and many others are kept down under the rug.

~~~
mynameisvlad
This HN page is currently #3 for the search query "Don't Trust Google". So I'm
going to call BS right there.

------
twobits
I don't think there is one instance in the history of mankind, that great
power hasn't been misused. ..I believe in unicorns too. ..But not that much.

------
itistoday2
um, so what happened to the p2p search engine?

