Is Google Good or Evil?

Is Google a force for good or evil?

Glinda, the Good Witch of the North: Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?
Dorothy: I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas.

A lot of people like to hate Google, simply because it is very big and successful.  When any company becomes big and successful, whether it be Microsoft or McDonald's, people like to hate it.  But Microsoft makes mediocre software and McDonald's makes mediocre hamburgers, so there is not a lot to like.

What about Google?

Google's corporate slogan was "Don't be Evil" which as seen as a dig against Microsoft and others, who try to monopolize a "space" in technology or the Internet - which of course usually backfires.  Google has become wildly popular, of course, mostly as a search engine.

But Google is so much more, of course.

To begin with, they have Gmail, which of the three major "free" e-mail services (Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Gmail) is probably the best of the three, although they all have the same or similar "look and feel".

What sets Gmail apart is Google Docs.  When someone sends you an attachment in Gmail, you can "view" it in Google Docs, which will load a viewer that will display the document, and allow you to print and save it.  This is very handy when you are using a public computer or someone Else's computer and don't want to clutter their hard drive with your documents and attachments.  It is also handy in that you can display documents in various formats without having to have the corresponding program that created those documents, loaded on your computer.

Google Docs is like a virtual hard drive - your space in the "cloud" - and while a little primitive, it allows you to save files in directories and sub-directories (file folders) for later retrieval.

Google Docs also has a primitive word processor that allows you to create new documents as well.  So in theory, at least, you could work "in the cloud" today, using Google Docs - which is what Google is hoping you will do.

Picasa is Google's photo hosting site, and unlike many competitors, including Webshots and now, Facebook, you can post JPEGS to Picasa and they surprisingly remain as JPEGS and are not converted to some weird proprietary format.  And Picasa doesn't ask you to "tag" people in their photos.  Unlike Facebook, Google isn't trying to get you to con all your friends into "joining" some proprietary site like Facebook is - or tagging your friends without their permission.

Do no evil, right?  Facebook needs to learn that.

Moreover, Picasa can be used to host photos, so you can take a photo, upload it, and then paste the URL for the photo in to your eBay listing, web page, or whatever.

And of course, all of this is free.

But wait, there's more!

Yes, Google also runs Blogger, the site you are on now.  Blogger is a little clunky compared to some Blog sites, but it works well for me.  And again, it is free.  So what's not to like?

So why do some folks hate Google?

Well, they are a business, and they do have to make money - all this commie crap about profits being bad aside (if you believe that, I can't help you).  So they sell ad space, and they do use your search queries and other data your submit to sell to marketers.

So, for example, I have posted several things about cruises.  Not surprisingly, a lot of ads that pop up on Google when I use it, are related to cruises.  When I mention Patents, patent ads appear, sometimes for odious Invention Broker companies.  They use your query data to tie into ads for related subject matter.

Of course, this sort of subject-matter ad linking sometimes backfires.

And of course, Google does take ad money from people who want their "hits" to be listed first for certain key word searches.  Invention brokers pay big money to be listed first for searched related to Patents.  But as I have noted before, one way to avoid trouble is to never click on any Internet ad, ever.  Look at Internet ads like you would police tape - as a means of marking off bad deals and outright rip-offs.

If you do see an ad that looks interesting, research the topic independently - usually searching on the keyword along with "ripoff" or "sucks" is instructive.  But 99 times out of 100, anything advertised on the Internet is a poor bargain.

So yes, Google takes ads and puts these paid hits at the top of the list.  BUT, you are free to ignore those hits, aren't you?  And without ads, Google wouldn't be able to pay the electricity bill for the servers.

Overall, I would have put down Google as "not evil" - in that they are providing an alternative to the O/S based concept of computing (Windows, Mac) and providing an alternative model (cloud computing) which I think, like everything else, will eventually catch on, after a lot of false starts and naysayers have their day.