You know what’s a pretty evil company? Monsanto. And according to Forbes EA is the most evil American company of the year (and not, oh, AIG or something). But Google? Eh, I just can’t buy it. There are far too many truly evil companies in the world that make it their business to turn a profit from killing or stealing or other less scrupulous means for me to bestow an adjective as strong as “evil” upon Google. A lot of the concern with Google stems from privacy of users and Google’s tendency to gather information about Googlers in order to better target advertisements. And you know what? I’m totally okay with that. Yes, it is invading my privacy. But whether or not Google uses our personal information to target advertising we can rest assured that there will be advertisements. And at the risk of seeing my screens cluttered with ads targeted to, oh I don’t know, elderly retired couples, Google can go right on ahead and creep my life so long as the final result is a more streamlined search experience. After all, they are a company and whether we consider them evil or not doesn’t change the fact that all companies, good and evil, are, at the end of the day, about the bottom dollar. And if Google’s means of achieving the bottom dollar is to whore out private information then so be it; just don’t kill and process humans and sell it as a food called Soylent Green when the world runs out of food.
And while having a search experience streamlined to only include things pertaining to our personality and needs defeats the purpose of an entirely open Web and is in fact a closed off world of everything us, Google doesn’t make it impossible to not be assaulted by a litany of things not relevant to our lives if we should so choose. Hell, nobody is forcing people to use Google. If the concern is that high there’s always AskJeeves.