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A comment on Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking. Parent comment

Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by aikah on Friday October 21, 2016 @02:21PM (#12763124)
> Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe

I think Google always was an ad company, using technology to push ads and never a engineering company using ads as a source of income.

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Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by the_watcher on Friday October 21, 2016 @03:48PM (#12763988)
Have you forgotten the years they went providing Google search without a single ad?
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Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by stonogo on Friday October 21, 2016 @04:58PM (#12764718)
Which years were those? Google has been putting ads in search results since at least 2000. Are you talking about 1998-2000?
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Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by the_watcher on Friday October 21, 2016 @07:38PM (#12765876)
Yes. Those are years, plural, when Google the company was not putting advertisements into search results. They may have always monetization via ads when they decided to turn it into a company (Larry and Sergei did not think about ads when they were developing the initial product, but I'll concede that they likely just hadn't ever considered that they'd be able to turn a research product into a company at all), but they inarguably built the product before selling one single advertisement.
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Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by mikeleeorg on Friday October 21, 2016 @04:32PM (#12764445)
So then would you say Google was a search company and is now an ad company?
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Re:Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tra... by the_watcher on Friday October 21, 2016 @07:35PM (#12765856)
It's still a search company. What search engine do you use? Who has built a better web search product than Google? I admire DuckDuckGo and am hopeful for them in the future, but Google is simply still the best search engine out there.
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