Don't be evil was the "slogan" that Google had originally come up with when it was first starting to get big. The phrase was originally suggested by employees, Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel. Paul was the Google employee that came up with Gmail. He thought that by making a motto like this, it would be hard to take it away from Google, once they put it out there.
Now there are a lot of allegations that Google is actually "Evil". It started when they launched Gmail. At the very beginning, they allowed advertisers to target the audience that advertisers wanted to target. So here's a case study: If you had emailed someone in Hawaii, you might see advertisements about Hawaii. This made people believe that the corporate giant was intruding into people's privacy. I disagree totally, and so did Google. By allowing advertising dollars to be spent wisely, advertisers could measure the effectiveness of their advertising dollar.
So is Google evil for allowing advertisers to target their audience? I would have to disagree. I believe that Sergy is an incredible genius with regards to how they built the giant search engine. At the time, their competition was Alta Vista, Netscape, Ask Jeeves and so on. I still remember the old search engines. (I must be a dinosaur!) You could put in a search term like "What is there to do in Phoenix" and the results would have nothing to do with activities, nor would it have anything to do with Phoenix. So, for our profession, someone would type in "Home for sale near Larkspur Elementary" and advertisers that are selling cheese might come up.
Sergy just knew that if someone could organize the world's data, then they could build a great Internet tool. And that is exactly what they did. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but I don't believe that Google is evil. But that's not what Steve Jobs would have you believing. He has actually called their "don't be evil" motto as being Bullsh*t! I think some companies are just jealous. They don't have the vision that these two young minded adults had back when Google was first starting up.
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