Don't be Google

http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2014/06/01

by chris-at • 12 years ago

84 30 12 years ago

doonesbury.washingtonpost.com

billynomates1• 12 years ago

Putting the punchline in the title totally ruined this.

rushabh• 12 years ago

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

jdbernard• 12 years ago

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/

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

mankyd• 12 years ago

Doonesbury is not calling Google evil for these things. They're pointing out that others have, fairly or otherwise.

lmm• 12 years ago

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).

infinotize• 12 years ago

Why? I hate advertising, and believe it's gotten way way way too pervasive in all aspects of modern life, but I still wouldn't even say it's inherently evil.

mseebach4• 12 years ago

No, it's not.

swalsh• 12 years ago

Future comment on the twitter stream "Shit HN Says" https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

cm20122• 12 years ago

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."

smanuel2• 12 years ago

Advertising is inherently evil

Advertising in its basic form is a lie. When advertising you never speak about the competitors who are better than you, the flaws in your offering, you extrapolate your advantages, you "fake it until you make it" and so on, but... "evil"?

Just like Churchill's saying about democracy (democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried), I would say the same about advertising.

Advertising is the worst form of informing people about what you can offer, except all other that have been tried.

Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Pfft, that would be so boring.

tomp4• 12 years ago

The way I understand it, it's not that cached data or page ranking are evil, but the way Google does it; it's completely opaque, prone to random changes (even though many people depend on it for their livelihood) and, the most important problem IMO, when there is an issue, Google is handling it really badly (e.g. nobody can be contacted about it) - not really something inherently evil, but something a big company could do something about (and Google chooses not to).

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

They're not inherently evil. What the comic actually says with respect to Google is "They've had issues with" those things.

afarrell• 12 years ago

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."

zatkin• 12 years ago

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

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

throwaway283719• 12 years ago

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!

Don't be Google

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