Comments on: Gizmodo loses it: Google has not turned evil (at least not yet . . .)

By: Stephen Bounds

Stephen Bounds — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:08:35 +0000

Thanks, I do know that and I have :)

That bit was more a commentary on the fact that I’ve had no reason to consider anyone other than Google for 10 years … they have done a good job up until now.

I’m a bit sorry that they seem to be falling into the same trap most companies who hold a dominant market leader position do.

By: I can't resist

I can't resist — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:54:54 +0000

Stephen, it isn’t that hard – use an address bar search and make the default provider bing or duckduckgo. No finger memory required.

By: Stephen Bounds

Stephen Bounds — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:02:22 +0000

To be clear: I think Gizmodo are overreacting. I assume that Google knows everything I do on their products and that they can use this to build up profiling information ... but they are assuming that what is useful to them is also useful to me. Something this is true (as you've outlined). But they are currently overreaching and it will come back to bite them because it makes the experience of using the individual apps worse. User-level integration between apps would be far better if it were less heavy-handed and people could choose to opt in.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:05:30 +0000

Fair enough, but the ‘portal’ strategy wasn’t adding anything substantial to user experience. If Google are making it hard for you to opt out of their megalomania I agree they’re being stupid. But the integration may also enable them to produce seriously useful innovations – such as those I’ve suggested above.

By: Stephen Bounds

Stephen Bounds — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:02:38 +0000

I don’t think Google are evil. I just think they are being stupid.

The key thing that distinguished Google from other search engines way back when was that they gave better quality results with no distractions.

When Google started to diversify, they made superior tools available for free (eg Google News, Google Maps, Google Reader, Picasa, and at least for some people Gmail). This was all good and useful.

Lately though, Google is clumsily attempting to increase the uptake of Google+ by making everything “social”. But I don’t want my Google+ contacts in Picasa, or for their content and images to be prioritised in my searches, or to see them automatically shown on my Maps, or for a Gmail email to trigger a notification to add that person on Google+. Because of cookie persistance, it’s very difficult to maintain different personas for all these apps each if you try to.

It’s the same ‘build an integrated user portal’ mistake made by Lycos and Yahoo! all those years ago.

The only difference is that the ‘portal’ is spread across multiple pages and applications rather than being presented on a single page. And my reaction is the same — to start looking for a new search provider.

It’s going to take a while to break the finger memory of typing ‘google.com’ when I want to search but I am going to try DuckDuckGo for a while.