http://www.webmasterworld.com/t/jbourne.gif, http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3395721.htm

The nice "clean" google is being replaced by porno-google who will do anything for an ad dollar.

Can't wait. I'd love to post a graphic if it doesn't cost body parts.

Mildly interesting - but are you saying that we're supposed to be upset because a business is trying to make some money?

In some schools of thought, presenting pictures of naked ladies isn't considered "evil" exactly.  So that COULD be part of a friendlier, more naked Google.

Ah, but by "porno-google" you don't mean a naked google, you mean "will do anything for a price" google.  Yeah, it's hard to remain "not evil" if you go very far down that road.

So maybe they're just "not evil" until they get "the right price"?  How commercial of them.

> - but are you saying that we're supposed to be
> upset because a business is trying to make some money?

No no, you are tragically hip and soothingly numb so nothing is a big deal.

But, for some of us, the advantage of google was it combined good search results with reasonable text ads that didn't take away from your prime purpose of finding stuff. They are moving away from that ethic.

When they start auctioning off your personal data I hope your response is still they are just trying to make money, what's wrong with that?

They were always evil.

Adopting that slogan was in fact part of their evil.  And it worked on an incredible number of people.

I bet if Pol Pot had used that slogan, he still be in power, supported by donations from the geeks of America.

> When they start auctioning off your personal data I hope your response is still they are just trying to make money, what's wrong with that?

There's plenty wrong with it.

But I won't be surprised or disappointed, because I never had any silly illusions about them being different from the other mega corporations.

> I never had any silly illusions

You are much too hard for those.

>You are much too hard for those.

Realism has nothing to do with being hard.

Google had an angle to make inroads when the search engine market was considered entrenched and unassailable -- minimalism and openness. It got them loved among the tech community: Suddenly they had a million free salespeople, pushing the Googleism widely.

Brilliant, really. It got the founders into private jumbo jets. Goodness/not-evil? Hardly.

Microsoft has demonstrated that sort of bullshit quite frequently, although they have a long enough history that the hypocrisy is far harder to miss. Recall when Microsoft was a nobody in the IM world -- they declared that the IM world should be open standards, where the best of breed clients should be able to hook into all the networks. They berated organizations like AOL for their evil, proprietary lock-in.

Then MSN got big enough and suddenly the rhetoric and openness started to disappear.

they sold out when they first found a way to monetize their search engine. ie, the first google ads.

are pictures that more hideous that text? i don't get it.

I knew it was just a matter of time.

"OMG, we need to pump up this quarter's earnings.  What can we do?"

> are pictures that more hideous that text?

Yes. They take much more space and reduce the signal to noise ratio off the serps.

serps? what's that?

i dunno. i can filter out image ads on slate.com or the economist, why not google?

now if they had those popup DHTML ads, getting in the way. that would suck.

> Yes. They take much more space and reduce the signal to noise ratio off the serps.

I find humor in the fact that you simultaneously view image ads on Google as being not too distant from the spawn of Satan, while also decrying cynicism (I would it personally call it realism), about Google.

Thank you for brightening an otherwise boring day!

They had an IPO. Nothing good could come from them after that.

It's like when Vader first smacked his woman. It was years later before he casted off his evil ways, and then he was dead.