Money is the root of all evil, right?
I guess Google is showing just how evil rich they are. If you haven't heard already, Google has entered the search market in China. But, in order to do so, they have sold what's left their soul (remember? They gave part of their soul to AOL). Instead of giving uncensored results, Google will censor the results according to what the Chinese government deems OK.
Well, that is not so bad, right? Other companies working in China also do that. Baidu, Yahoo!, and others do it, why would I put this double standard on Google? Easy, because Google sat on their high horse and proclaimed that they would "do no evil" for financial gain, something that the other companies did not proclaim. And now, for Chinese money, Google has done evil. Yes, money is the root of all Google's evil.
Google has even changed their statement about censoring results -- actually, they have completely taken down the page. The page used to have the question, "Does Google censor search results?" And the answer was that Google "does not censor results for any search term" citing the "democracy" of the web. I guess, for countries without democracy, Google will gladly remove democracy from their search results for a quick dollar. Don't insult our intelligence Google.
Sergey Brin tries to justify Google's money-hungry evil with this statement: "We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it." Uhm, yea, right. The decision was easy: There was money to be made and doing just a little bit of evil to get the money...well, that's OK.
Oh, and here's another good one from Google (man, they are really trying to up their evilness quite quickly nowadays huh?) : Google will start testing rich media ads, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. Yes, now Google will start to pass out annoying ads. Interstitials are those ones that annoy me the worst (even worse than pop-ups). They are the ads that come between your click and the actual page -- you go to a page, they show you ad with the words "you page will load after this advertisment", how annoying! Floating and expanding ads? Bad also.
Yes, Google is chasing the buck now. Since they are going and changing/erasing the pages listing the principles they "stand" for, they might as well just erase the whole "do no evil" crap because Google is now a big corporation and just like any other corporation: Evil is relative to how much money they can make. Don't kid yourself that Google actually cares about not being evil, they have stockholders to answer to and they will do anything for financial gain.