Granted, Google’s continued investment in ad-supported services only reinforces this unholy co-dependence, but I’m not sure what Google would gain by offering non-ad-supported services that flopped. Starbucks at least gets good PR (public relations, not PageRank!) for selling fair-trade coffee.

In any case, selling to enterprises is different from selling to online consumers. Enterprises still understand the concept of paying for products and services. Some of them even have customers who pay them!

So let’s look at the other side of the coin. Instead of looking at a single big decision, let’s look at a long term pattern of tiny decisions. Now I ask: In the 8-9 years since Google made that big decision to show advertising, and in the 7-8 years since that decision made them profitable, and in the 5 years since that decision made them insanely rich, how many decisions has Google made to release product that were “fair-trade, pay for what you get” products?

One. The Google Enterprise box.

And how many decisions has Google made to release products that were advertising supported, either directly or (through advertising as a subsidy on the main site) indirectly? Dozens? Hundreds?

Let’s add up all those tiny little decisions, and look at what sort of pattern emerges, look at what sort of tapestry Google has been weaving. Even when we do this, it becomes very clear to me that Google has little or no desire to wean itself from the advertising nipple, little or no desire to minimize that “inherent bias towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Instead, Google has been more than happy to cultivate advertising in a myriad of forms, growing, rather than reducing, their anti-consumer bias.

And I ask this as someone who hates the ad-supported model and would much prefer a world where people simply paid for the products services they consume, online as we do offline. But that’s not the world we live in today, and I’m not even sure it’s the world we lived in back when Google first bit the fruit of advertising.

we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. ”

That sums it up. That’s what Google originally meant by “evil”. Certainly not in any hitlerian sense, of course not. But the fundamental incompatibilities between advertisers and users.

The thing is, Google didn’t have to be advertising supported. That was a conscious decision that came later, 2-3 years after they started the company. They could have gone with another model.. subscription, micropayments, etc. But they didn’t choose that route. They looked around, saw what Overture was doing, and copied Overture’s business model. And in the process, they threw out the door their previous statements about advertisers, and integrated into their fledgling company that full “inherent bias[] towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

So you are absolutely correct, Steve. Google’s interests are first and foremost to their shareholders, not to their users. That by itself is not evil, or at least no more evil that the rest of our society The problem comes in how Google is going about serving their shareholders. Rather than serving their shareholders, by making money off of subscriptions or micropayments or similar business models, they are serving their shareholders by going to that very business model that they originally proclaimed did not serve user interest: advertising.

That effort of being a “different” company didn’t become a joke only recently. It became a joke 8-9 years ago, when they started showing their first ads.

But Google has put a lot of effort into publicly branding themselves as a different kind of company. I don’t see Microsoft or Wal-Mart exhibiting such pretensions. Apple, maybe, but their attitude is more “we know better than you” than “we answer to a higher calling”.

I have no problem accepting Google as a business and judging it on those terms. But if Google is going to claim more, then I’ll be among those keeping them honest.

IIRC the term “do no evil” was originally coined by Paul Buchheit (ex-Googler and now FriendFeed) in the early days of Google.

When it comes to your point about the PageRank stuff Daniel I have no problem with Google keeping those cards close to the chest after all they are a business and PR has always been its ace in the hole – so to speak – and really I think it should remain that way.

I will say however that being a business Googles interests are to its shareholders and Founders not the users regardless of what they might say in public. As such when they say search is 90% figured out I just laugh because in my opinion (for what it is worth) I don’t see it even nearing the 50% marker.

I also don’t see anything wrong with they way they conduct their advertising business in relation to search even if it is geared more to their benefit rather than the content producers. The idea of a Chinese Wall has always been a joke regardless of the medium but I would suggest that traditional media these days make more of a joke of the concept that any group of content producers – including Google.

The fact is that business is inherently evil to one degree or another. After all business isn’t about us all sitting around a campfire singing little ditties of friendship. Business is about making money and no matter how we might like to think otherwise that means doing evil things of varying degrees. There has never been; nor will there ever be, a successful company who at some point hasn’t commited a transgression of one sort or another. To think that Google isn’t – or won’t or hasn’t – done the same is deluding themselves.

But that’s what I’m still struggling to figure out with the blogosphere. I enjoy the raw discussion, more than I particularly enjoy leading the discussion. And being the “blogger” as opposed to the “commenter” means that one’s task is slightly different. No, the majority stake it still yours; you set the tone, as it should be.

Hmm.. the question about whether there should be any advertising at all? I think that’s an interesting topic, in and of itself. But that deserves its own post. Maybe time to start my own blog? Heh.

I made a typo in my previous comment that I’ve now fixed–I meant to say “I cede”, not “I ceded”.

But to reiterate, I think your point about resource allocation is a fair one, even if it’s one we can’t resolve with the available information. And it is a point the debaters were remiss not to at least bring up. A more extreme question might be whether it’s inherently “evil” to be, at heart, a company that sells ads?

I am currently on page 67 of 74 of the debate transcript, and so far I have not seen a single mention of where the “don’t be evil” phrase really came from. The closest someone got is when they said something like “what google really meant was ‘don’t be greasy’”

That’s in the right spirit, but it still doesn’t tell the history and context, which is all about advertising incentives and search incentives and how they fundamentally and naturally conflict with each other. Not “being evil” is all about figuring out two things: (1) Where do the sources of this search vs. ads conflict come from, and (2) How do we keep each of those conflict sources from happening?

One source of the conflict is with ranking promotion. Google manages that particular conflict by separating ads and organic results, placing the ads to the right of the organic results, or placing them in-line with (above) the organic results, but with a different background color. One could argue whether or not in-line ads are well-enough separated (i.e. whether there should be anything above the first organic result or not), but generally, both the cause of, and a reasonable solution to, this particular conflict is well understood.

But ranking promotion is only one of many sources of conflict between search and ads.

There are other, often more subtle conflicts. One such conflict is the amount of resources dedicated to each. How much effort do you spend improving search vs. improving advertising. Spending any amount of time or money on one will, automatically, mean that you have spent less time on the other. You often have a choice — do you implement exploratory search, or do you add ads to YouTube?

So there is a fundamental conflict — a resource mixture conflict. How is this conflict resolved? Is the conflict even acknowledged, within Google’s walls? Because if it is not even acknowledged, then I would argue Google is being evil, in the sense that they are not being true to their original motto of keeping search and ads incentives from trampling on each other, because it will never try to solve a problem that it doesn’t think exists.

Have you heard the quote from that Kevin Spacey movie, The Usual Suspects? “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Great line.

The message is that if we refuse to acknowledge that a problem even has the potential to exist, we’ll never believe it, even if that problem does exist. And since not even one of the six people on the Intelligence Squared panel seemed to be even remotely aware of the “resource conflict” mixed incentive issue between ads and search, I have to be wary. Maybe Google is doing a fantastic job of managing the resource conflict issue. But if the panel doesn’t even know to ask the question, it will never do a good job of figuring out whether or not Google has been evil. And the question at least needs to be asked.

But in terms of visibility into their decision-making process, I think that it helps to see what they’re publicly saying about each area, ads and search.

For search, remember this little gem from last September?

http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/09/07/quick-bites-is-search-really-90-solved-2/

If the internal belief is that search is 90% done, then where do you think most of Google’s effort is going? Probably not into search. Oh, I’m sure there is some maintenance that needs to happen. You have to keep the system running, tweak things here and there. And you always need a team to fight search spam. But that’s part of the 90% that they’ve already mostly done.

Contrast that with Eric Schmidt’s recent statements about how Google does not have a monopoly on advertising.. because text search ads represent but a very small portion of the total advertising market. Google has made it clear that they want a larger piece of that whole, very large market.

To me, that speaks volumes about their decision-making process.. or at least about the attitudes that feed into that process. If you think you’re done with search, except for a little bit of maintenance, but have a lot more that you want to do with advertising, then that is where you are going to dedicate your innovative efforts. And I think that it shows.

Anyway, all I was trying to say is that, at least from your summary of the “Intelligence Squared” debate, I saw zero discussion on where the “don’t be evil” motto came from, what its historical context and origins within Google are. And it seems to me that before you even start discussing something like China, you have to understand where the motto came from; it came from a relationship between search and advertising, and some of Brin&Page’s very early statements about the mixed incentives that advertising-based search engines face.

Maybe you can bring this up with Jeff Jarvis, ask him a little more about it, and report back to us. If this is something that is interesting to you. I would be interested in hearing that conversation.

I’m saying that we have to go by what Google themselves have said, and where the historical context and motivation for that phrase came from. And “evil”, when it was first used by Google, meant placing the needs of the advertisers above the needs of the users.

So the question is whether, by putting more effort into advertising initiatives (youtube ads, dmarc/radio ads, google print ads, image search ads, gmail ads, ever-expanding adwords features, ever-expanding adsense features) than into search initiatives, they are valuing the advertiser more than the user. If so, then by their* own* definition, they are “evil”.

But that’s the question. How much time and effort has Google spent increasing search relevance, versus how much time and effort has Google spent expanding advertising initiatives?

Whose needs are currently being serviced more? The users’ or the advertisers’?

You’ve said Google is resting on their laurels in search. I think so too. But Google doesn’t appear to be resting on their laurels in advertising. New ads are popping up everywhere across Google properties.

I am not talking about a failure of imagination. That’s different from laurel-resting. I’m talking about a decision about where resources are allocated.

Of course, it’s not how I define transparency. By my definition, they violate transparency by using a secretive ranking algorithm. But I don’t think it’s fair to Google to say that they’re evil just because they don’t live up to my standards. My delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, I don’t have that power to judge.

A more interesting question is whether, by their own standards, they are striving to be the best they can be. I do question whether than can truly uphold a Chinese wall between search and advertising when advertising is what pays the bills, and that might be subtly influencing where they invest their efforts. But all I can offer there is groundless speculation.

That’s why I stick to concrete examples of what they actually have done. And, to be clear, I think that, on the whole, the world is far better off with Google than without Google. That’s good enough for me. But they’re the ones who picked the higher standard.

But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Isn’t transparency one of the key points on which you often rail against Google?

If to not be evil meant to be transparent, and if Google is now anything but transparent.. doesn’t that mean Google has broken its own self-proclaimed definition of evil?

For the moment, forget China missteps. Forget copyright double-standards. Forget all the other issues that have cropped up. Just look at the core idea of transparency, and what that originally meant to Google, in terms of “evilness”.

“Don’t be evil” arose from Google-internal discussions about the relationship between advertising and search relevance. Correct?

Let’s go back to Brin and Page’s original WWW paper, the one that started this whole thing. I quote from that paper (emphasis mine):

“Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. ”

Now this is very curious to me, because it is not just about having a clear separation between the ads and the organic results. It’s about the motivation and incentives that occur when advertising is your business model.

We could have a larger debate about whether it broke the original “evil” motto when Google started placing ads above the organic results. Whether or not those ads were clearly delineated, they still appear as the first results to your query.. which places the needs of the advertisers.. literally.. above the needs of the consumers.

But again, we don’t even have to have that debate, because look at what Brin and Page say in the very next paragraph, in their 1997 paper: “Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. ”

You conclude your blog post, Daniel, with this statement: “Nonetheless, I believe that Google, by resting on its laurels, is dragging the rest of the world down it its complacency. Do I blame Google for its complacency? Yes, I do, and I’ve told them as much.”

Is not “resting on [one's] laurels” the same thing as proving poorer results than one could provide, if one were not resting on one’s laurels? Isn’t that what resting on one’s laurels is.. not being the best one could be?

It sounds like you are saying that Google really has fallen prey to that “advertising income incentive”, which is that once ad money comes rolling in, they stop improving things as much as they could.

So if you take a historical perspective, and go back to what Google themselves meant by “evil”, doesn’t it seem to you that they’ve now become that very thing that they once called evil? What does it matter if the ads above the organic results have a different background color? If this advertising is causing them to rest on their laurels, then it is providing incentives that are incompatible with producing the best results for users.

Seriously, you rightly note, like the opposition in the debate, that profitability and competitiveness are not inherently evil, and that fair wages, in a market economy, are determined by the market. That said, you don’t address the two main charges against Wal-Mart: the lock-ins and the claim that their wage and health care policies have been designed to make their employees dependent on government subsidies.

In any case, I find my own arguments–on both sides–more convincing than those used by the debaters. Perhaps I’m the one guilty of hubris!