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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

There’s something very rotten at the top levels at Google. The “Don’t be evil” motto has long disappeared and has been replaced by apathy and/or hostility on different fronts.

Maybe this move by Google is actually good...to help more employees and others realize how the company has morphed into something that’s no longer doing as much good for humanity as it used to boast about.

I’m still hopeful that the rot in companies like Google and Facebook will be the biggest trigger for decentralized and privacy respecting platforms (and also in this context, preserving the freedom of people to dissent) to grow faster.

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Relations with Google are definitely starting to sour, here are a few recent examples:

- IE switches to Chromium engine, Chrome has full clearance to dominate the web.

- Questionable actions toward ad-blocking (seen only just yesterday).

- Colluding with China to create a blatantly dishonest search engine.

- Questionable products (Google Fi, Pixel phone, Google Home, etc, are share their own controversies)

- Search results quality is decreasing (which is just my personal speculation, DDG is usually retrieves less polluted results).

Let me know if I missed anything.

A somewhat recent news about Google’s silence on sexual harassment by men at senior levels while paying them big exit packages a few years ago.

Logging people in to Chrome automatically and then backing out after heavy backlash.

Google tracking Android users’ location and using it even when they have turned it off.

Then there’s also an older one — Google’s bypassing of Safari’s privacy protection through default blocking of third party cookies.

I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed.

By men youean man. And isolated events with individual employees who arguably had alot of power -- given he founded Android -- is a non issue in this argument.

Google or any company has no responsibility or should be required to publicly shame employees who misbehave. And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened.

The rest of your conserns seem valid though.

As a shareholder at Google, it is absolutely one's business whether the company is paying hush money to make personnel problems go away.

I don't think being a shareholder gives you such rights. Even so, the guy in question probably had more shares than you thus trumps your desire to be a busy body.

Lets see you walk on the google campus and demand to see who has been reprimanded recently to some random manager. As you are dragged off the campus yelling "but but but I am a shareholder....."

But beyond that it is more likely he had a exit plan under which he was guaranteed such money when he joined google, bringing his baby Android. And as I recall it it was not as cut and dry of a situation as everybody likes to make it out to be. It never is.

So you can be outraged all you want, and perpetuate phantom "rights" of being a share holder, but at the end of the day you are not helping the situation.

I don't think being a shareholder gives you such rights.

Doesn't the state of California actually allow vested shareholders to inspect certain financial records and other inspection rights? Wouldn't this include the records of finances marked for distribution from a legal settlement or otherwise?

I didn't claim rights; I said it's my business.

Shareholders should be justifiably concerned and can be expected to put pressure on a company that's cagey about such matters. Because it increases the risk that they'll have a messy scandal on their hands that could impact share value.

Please read this recent news about a lawsuit brought by a shareholder against the board. [1] There's more than one man named in that.

> And it really is non of your or my business that any of that happened.

I strongly disagree. If we have to criticize or call for action only when we're personally impacted, we wouldn't have civilized society. Google paid "hush money" to not reveal what happened. Also, more than 20000 Google employees who staged a walkout in November [2] disagree with your statement that it's none of anybody's business.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/technology/google-rubin-s...

[2]: http://fortune.com/2018/11/03/google-employees-walkout-deman...

Number of people doing something does not strengthen any argument.

I can point to 100s of things that the masses do that are completely wrong. So the fact that 20k Google employees did anything does not mean they were right.

A civilized society does not have people getting outraged and storming out of work every time they feel offended, or don't agree with the actions of others. Even more so when those people simply do not have the facts of the situation -- mostly because it was none of their business in the first place.

Everything you say above (except the last sentence) is true in the general sense. But you seem to have missed what's happened in the sexual harassment scene around the world in the last few years, and hence treating this as a one off expression of anger by some people doesn't make sense. I've said enough on this topic for now.

Search results quality is decreasing (which is just my personal speculation, DDG is usually retrieves less polluted results).

My experience is that DDG results are terrible. I try it periodically and never lasts more than a day. Has that changed?

I should clarify, google is rife with visual noise, especially for simple queries. As an example, try googling "how to clean rain gutters" in both search engines. You'll need to scroll half down the page, past "Suggested Clip", past "People also ask", past "Videos", to finally arrive at the 1st search result. DDG also shows videos, but doesn't require scrolling.

EDIT: I forgot about ads because I use an ad blocker! If you don't use an ad-blocker, you'll also have to scroll past a large section of ads.

I think you're perceiving some signal as noise. For me personally, that "Suggested Clip" is what I'd be searching for.

For me DDG is still nowhere close to Google, but I wouldn't classify it as terrible in general. Also, DDG doesn't have searching by date range and doesn't have searching for recent results beyond one month.

What I do is use DDG as my default, and then progressively use the bang commands [1] to move to Startpage with !s and then to Google with !g. Sometimes it takes a little longer to find something, but I try to avoid using Google search directly as much as possible.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

It is definitely not as good, especially for certain queries. Those tend to be queries that have additional semantic meaning outside of just the keywords typed.

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