Good for Google

06 June 2012

Well written piece by Danny Sullivan on Google’s shifting policy on paid inclusion: > But disclosure doesn’t mean that Google is not doing paid inclusion, nor that Google wasn’t opposed to it in the past. It did characterize paid inclusion as some type of evil back then to be avoided; it clearly no longer views paid inclusion as evil but rather helpful in the search process.

It’s tempting to jump on the ‘don’t be evil’ bandwagon in these cases, but I think that’s missing the point. Companies are not good or evil, though it’s tempting, and simplistic, to conceptualise them as such. Companies simply reflect the most powerful and influential people at the helm, reacting to the business environment around them at a given time. 

It used to be that Google’s organic search results were unequivocally great, but recently I’ve been using DuckDuckGo and found it to be adequate for about ninety-five percent of my web searches (localised listings aside).

The ‘don’t be evil’ mantra has out-lived its usefulness for Google, both publicly and privately. Google will continue to do what’s good for Google: We get to decide wether that’s good for us, too.