“...providing a free service to the world.”
Google doesn’t deserve to be honored that way.
Twenty odd years ago, in the dawning of the Internet, Alta Vista may have deserved that honor. Their mission was geared toward serving the end user (the individual PC user doing the search).
Sure, there was sponsorship and they were in it to make money, but their search engine was designed to do what a search engine would be expected to do, namely, return results based on the Boolean search keywords entered, and rank the results honestly according to the statistical occurance of the search keys the user actually entered.
Those days are long gone. Google is engineered geared toward the merchant, not the end user, and providing an honest Internet search function for the end user is the last thing they care about.
Think of it like a department store. In the old days, they wanted the customer to be able to quickly find what they were looking for, and organized the store with that in mind. Today, they want you to be lost and confused like a rat in a maze, with the idea that you will have to walk down every aisle, into every dead end cul de sac, and past every eye catching kiosk.
It’s the same with Google. Their mission is not to provide me and you with access to information - their mission is to provide merchants with access to me and you. We are no longer the hunters, roaming the Internet in search of game. We are the prey, being delivered to slaughter.
I have to problem with Google making money, it’s the false advertising that I object to.
Spot on. Per a recent Barron’s article, Google gets 40 bucks per month per user from ads.
exactly.
I know what they do and why but the argument used to squeeze cash from them is cr@p.