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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what are they doing different now from then? Back then they had an ad business, and now they have an ad business. Back then they created useful services like Maps, Translate or Gmail, now they provide useful services like Photos, Docs and Drive.

What are they doing now that is "joining the evil" which they weren't doing before? Is your point about the fact that people's perception has changed? People these days just take free online services for granted and no longer want to put up with ads, but if it were all to go away, the majority of people would see it as a strict negative.

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Now they had years of destroying trust, cancelling products and moving away from open standards (Reader, XMPP, web standards controversy, these proprietary Gmail experiments).

Privacy debacles like Buzz also played the part, as had this push for Google+, when they had tried to force everyone to use it.

Also, their grip on the Android OS is stronger, then Microsoft's grip over Windows ever was, and they abuse it, freezing AOSP and developing only proprietary features that lock developers into Google's services. Plus to that, they are now dominant in web browser market, with only Firefox being our last bastion against the browser monoculture. They have defeated the dragon and had become the dragon themselves. It's hilarious that the Boogeyman of the 00s, Microsoft, is now seen in a way more positive light than our former champion of the free and open web.

And yeah, the advertising had ballooned to insane levels.

I think it's that, now, everything is to feed the ad business while back in the day, it wasn't.

back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business.

I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.

Even less data is being used for ads than when you worked there - Gmail is no longer used, Photos doesn't use them, Android doesn't except insomuch as the Google search bar exists on the home screen, Maps barely has ads...

> Gmail is no longer used

Any evidence of that? Enterprise GSuite is not supposedly used, but consumer Gmail not feeding into ads would be surprising to me. Android feeds location and contacts data.

Not much evidence, but they stopped reading emails to target ads a while ago. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-wi...

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

Thanks. That's insightful.

> Maps barely has ads...

maybe you're using a different version of maps than I am, but I just downloaded it and the first page is chock full of ads, it begs me to turn on search history so it can show me "more relevant results".

it's also full of dark-patterns like if I click "commute" in the settings, there's no back "<" like there is in most views, but there's a nice blue "turn on" and a grayed out "no thanks".

hell, when you finally disable the account linkage (another dark pattern hiding that option), the main window is still 25% (+) ads.

https://imgur.com/a/IMg3PQf

Not sure what the screenshot is meant to show but... There is not a single ad on it.

It's not the ads. It's that Google literally had a mantra 'Don't be evil' but it was removed and much of their questionable actions to appease shareholders and pursue a profit. Back then, they gave up on the Chinese market to stick to their values. Now we have Project Maven, Dragonfly, restricting employee discourse etc. It isn't the worst company around by a long shot but the difference is obvious.

to be fair, "don't be evil" is still there, they just close with it rather than opening and closing with it.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

>I'm curious, what are they doing different now from then?

Nothing. To me Google has always been the same. It is just people believed in the "Do No Evil", when everyone has a different definition of Evil. So Google didn't change much, people's opinion did.

"Most Evil are created by those who think themselves as so Righteous." -Me

Google's ad experience is night and day different than it was 15+ years ago, and IMO what they do now is much more 'evil' than what they did back then:

1. One big reason that Google became so popular is they clearly delineated ads in the top bar and siderail, but the vast majority of search results were 'natural' search. Google even touted it back in the day: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ . TBH I'm surprised that page is still up.

2. For many of my searches ads now take up the ENTIRE front page of content, especially on mobile. It's virtually impossible for any business to survive by SEO alone, because Google has ensured that virtually all "commercial terms" get a ton of ads first. Paying "the Google tax" means business need to buy ads on their own name lest another business bid more and rank higher.

3. In the early days, Google was much less reliant on their "surveillance capitalism" because they already had a great signal to show you ads: what you searched for. Of course, the way capitalism works is it demands they squeeze every additional dollar where possible, so keeping track of everything you do allows them to make more money.

4. One small example, enough has been said regarding AMP and its negative impact on the web and small publishers on HN many times over, so no need to add more here IMO.

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