In a wide-ranging and well written article that explores several facets of the company and its recent somewhat disturbing policies, Mat Honan’s presentation of the case against Google includes:

• Google has become a fundamentally different company than the trustworthy one that could be relied upon just 18 months ago.
• Part of the transformation is because Google wants to deliver personalized search results. For that it needs information about your friends, your family, your finances, your preferences, what you like to watch, where you like to eat and even information about the local events around you.
• Facebook did for people finding what Google did for internet finding: return what’s most relevant. If you type in a friend’s name into Facebook you’ll likely find who you’re looking for. Not so with Google.
• Google’s motto is ‘Don’t be Evil’ and the company once argued that one example of becoming evil would be to serve advertisements without making it clear that they are just ads not legitimate or relevant results. The way Google is advertising its products such as Google Plus in general searches falls foul of that policy and would make Google, under its own definition, evil.
• Google no longer considers search to be a core product. The only product is Google itself.

To read a list of some of the surprising practices that Google has engaged in, including possible fraud in Kenya, Honan’s response to counter-arguments, why Google no longer returns the highest quality search results, how we’ve moved to from a world of search to a world of answers, and what a Googlesque future would look like, click here.

Source: Gizmodo

Via: The Economist