Google is Evil
For quite some time now Toni and I have been warning people not to be fooled by Google; it’s mantra of “Don’t be Evil” is nothing more than a smokescreen.
Of course that idea won us few friends and lots of people probably thought that we were totally crazy but now even businesses are beginning to wake up to the fact that Google is not the nice warm fuzzy entity that it likes to portray itself as.
You see someone finally took the time to read the fine print in the $90 million dollar settlement Google offered to those who claimed to have been defrauded while participating in Google’s Adwords programme. And what they found in the fine print was rather nasty.
A quick breakdown of the proposed settlement shows that:
The plaintiffs get no cash at all
The plaintiffs only get credits against future advertising
The plaintiffs don’t even get full credits - all they get is a pro rata share of Google’s revenues from online advertising during the class period. There is some suggestion that at the most a plaintiff will only get credits totally 0.45% of its total spending with Google
But wait, the best is yet to come. Google has the final say on whether or not a plaintiff actually gets anything at all.
You can read the full story here
May 5th, 2006 at 7:59 am
No matter how clean of an image a company tries to project, there are inevitably going to be flaws along the way. I’m not judging Google one way or the other, but I have a feeling that the world’s love affair with this company is going to come crashing to an end sometime soon.
May 5th, 2006 at 8:37 am
G’day Bill
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that they started out with the right intentions but somewhere along the way they have become dazzled by their own image and now there is no other valid viewpoint but the one that they have.
They are even demanding that webmasters change things like the alt tags in images on websites because those tags can be stuffed with keywords. That’s fine, they can, but they can also be stuffed with words so that blind people can get a description of the image that they can’t see.
In some parts of the world it’s a legal requirement to have sites that cater fully for blind people but Google doesn’t see that they should have to abide by the laws of those countries.
Yet for commercial gain they feel they should abide by the laws of other countries such as China.