‘s company policy Don’t be evil is as simple as the site.
Not only do I think Google is one of the most useful tools ever, I also think they’re one of the best examples of a company ever. How a few nerds could pull this off is amazing, considering the pressures even from within their own company to cave to the “tried and true” marketing methods.
What they’re proving is that you can have a profitable business without an insane amount of advertising. You don’t need millions of features, you just need a few excellent ones. You don’t need to go public to have one of the most popular sites on the Internet. You can be a geek, and still maintain the original vision for your company.
It doesn’t even upset me that their new toy, froogle.com, could eventually put Price.com out of business. As a founder of Price.com, I always knew something better would come, and we’d need to be one step ahead of it. Erik and I thought of froogle.com before Google was around, and we knew it would be a very powerful tool. But it didn’t make sense to those with the most say in the company. Marketing didn’t like it, the financial brains didn’t like it. Not selling banner ads was a very difficult idea for marketing to grasp, which is easy for me to understand. Google took a risk, and it payed off. We were too far into the game to take that risk, and I wasn’t able to make a strong enough case for it.
Google is being pressured to supress links to content that supports hate groups. The Church of Scientology filed a lawsuit against Google for linking to an anti-Church of Scientology website, claiming the site infringed on their copyright. People have made some serious noise about Google caching content that has since been removed by website admins.
My personal opinion on the whole thing: Google should supress nothing, cache away, link to everything, including copywritten material. It’s like a hammer. If someone hits you in the head with a hammer, you don’t sue Stanley tools, you sue the swinger.
What’s your opinion?