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According to PBS columnist (and podcaster!) Bob Cringely, Google is rigging its AdWords system in order to, umm, encourage you to keep paying more. This isn't illegal.... nor are slot machines in Vegas. There is an argument for both being Evil.
Google prides itself on its infrastructure being built on Open Source. AdWords and PageRank, though, are still very much proprietary... with all the pitfalls that lie in that direction. Frankly, Google is beginning to sound a lot like a certain company down the road from here... and given the amount of information under their control, that really scares me.
Discussion encouraged... both about evilness, and about how to route around it.
September 23 2005, 17:30:35 UTC 6 years ago
September 23 2005, 17:41:47 UTC 6 years ago
September 23 2005, 18:12:58 UTC 6 years ago
September 23 2005, 19:42:56 UTC 6 years ago
To address the original article first, Cringely's friend is doing what we call in the research world, a "one off". It is statistically useless unless you reproduce it and vary other things. Saying that Google must be doing X based on one piece of evidence that can easily be explained as an anomaly is just Bad Science. So while I sometimes like Cringely's columns, I think he was sloppy on this one.
Google doing evil: Let me ask you this. If you found out that Google was charging $1000 for its search engine software to be run on a company website and that they had figured out that it only costs them $50 to actually support and maintaint the software. Would you consider them evil if they sold it for $1000.
Evil is usually pretty damned obvious and not confusing.
September 26 2005, 19:53:24 UTC 6 years ago