iPioneer: Mark Johnson's Blog

Who is the most evil company in the world?

My friend Sameer passed this on to me and I just thought it was hillarious.  Try typing the following query into Google, and press "I'm feeling lucky":

Who is the most evil company in the world?

Guess what ya get?  Tee hee. Try other fun phrases like "Do all the evil you can" or the simple: "Do evil."  If anyone has a good query, leave it in the comments!

I'm full of schadenfreude today, as my friend Tony is buying back a bunch of his shorts on GOOG at a healthy profit, due to their stumbling.  I'm sure they'll bounce back in the near future, but what happens if they miss next quarter?  Note that operational costs are starting to whack their earnings.  They won't be able to pay low salaries when new employees are worried about options being underwater.  Just del.icio.us!

The Internet is for Porn

My feelings about Google are no secret, but today I must defend them. John Battelle made an extremely prescient statement in his book, The Search, written last year.  I'm afraid that what he predicted is coming true even sooner than we'd like.

Yahoo, AOL, and MSN bowed to a DOJ subpeona, which asked them to provide search data.  Apparently, the data isn't about stopping child porn, it's about building the evidence for another law to protect kiddies online. As you may remember, the ACLU got the Supreme Court to strike down the the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in 2004.  Maybe Bush and his friends at the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families want to try for another version of COPA, supported with data stolen from private industry.  With two new justices on the Supreme Court and COPA being defeated by a slim 5-4 ruling, another version might stand.  To get an idea about how insane the folks at NCPCF are, check out this statement from Jack Samad, one of their SVPs: "Young people are experiencing broken lives after being exposed to adult images and behaviors on the Internet."  This whole mess is amazingly misguided. 

Think about all of the mail, IM conversations, search logs, music, and purchases that you've made through a major service in the past year.  I can tell you that I'm going to clean up my Yahoo! Mail accounts immediately (for all the good that will do me, as I assume they have backups).  The world of computers has bounced from mainframe->personal computer->internet.  Once people begin to fear their privacy, I think we'll begin to see services that transfer networked information to a secure location on user's PC. I'll sign up!

Please write to your congressperson and let them know what you think.

And if you've never heard it, check out "The Internet is for Porn" from Avenue Q (lyrics listed below)

Google Script Error on Sponsored Links Page

Google QA is not infallible!  To repeat: do a search for something with a lot of ads and click on the "More sponsored links" link under the ads.  Then, on the resulting page, click on the text of any ad and you'll get a script error.  Schadenfreude!

Spamless Google Hotel Results?

Google is evil!

I was doing some searches today in Google and noticed that their results for "las vegas hotels" were too good.  There's no spam at all and there are many results from actual Las Vegas hotels.  To me, it looked like the results had been hand-picked.  I did some other searches in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco and all of the results were very good.  Hmmm.  Then I did a search in Fresno, Des Moines, and Portland and got mixed results.  Clearly, the smaller the city is, the worse the results get.  And, the results seem to preference chains like Starwood, Wyndham, and Fairmont.  I checked MSN and Yahoo and their searches are still riddled with spam.  Results 11-20 were systematically but not categorically worse, which might suggest a focus on the first page.  I also checked "cheap boston hotels" in Google, which returned spam, as one would expect. 

So what's Google up to?  My guess is that they either have an intern hand-picking the first page or they're bumping up hotel sites artificially.  Or, maybe the hotel chains are "working with" Google to make sure their results move up higher. . . hmmmmmm.  Sounds like a Gevil conspiracy to me!

"Don't be evil" doesn't mean "Be good"

Actually, there are a number of things which "Don't be evil," the famous company philosophy from Google's original shareholder letter, does not mean:

• "Be good" -- There are plenty of shades of good/bad in ethics.  There are corner cases that some would consider evil; and there are plenty of items in "bad" that don't quite make it to evil but remain questionable.
• "Be without fault" -- This is patently false, though many people treat Google as if this were true
• "Always act in the interest of Google users" -- what happens when the shareholders, employees, advertisers, or some other group's interests are in conflict?  Something has to give.
• "We'll never become a big, evil corporation" -- people are inherently distrustful of big, powerful companies.  Do you really want Google to control your Internet access, your e-mail, your books, your blogs, your. . .

I find a certain arrogance about Google people that suggests that Googlers expect people to trust them to do "good" because of this maxim.  I attended a talk with Marisa Mayer, product manager for Google.com at PARC one evening.  Though her talk was interesting, she wouldn't share simple pieces of information that she deemed proprietary knowledge.  Does it really matter if we know how many times a month Google does user testing?  Of course, the Google argument is: "We'll keep creating great interfaces with our secret formula.  Just trust us."  I don't; and I believe that a restriction on knowledge sharing is endemic of large companies that people love to hate.  Luckily, some leading companies like Big Blue realize the value of sharing some information in the marketplace.

Another disturbing trend is the inability for many Google employees to say anything about their job.  They can tell you that they're an engineer and that's it: most that I've encountered won't even tell me what group they work in.  I've heard from one employee that such information is even restricted internally at Google.

I suggest to Google if they want not to be evil, they improve transparency.  At some point, Google will trip, people will suspect indiscretion (evil?), and Google's fear of sharing will make them look all the more guilty.

Maybe Google can weaken their cherished maxim: Do your best not to be evil!