For me, the very extensive track record you allude to is more than enough to convince me that Google's never flipping the "don't be evil" bit back on. It's gone. Done. Sayonara. Adios. Bon voyage. Kaput. Fin. Au revoir.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I tend to agree. Companies don't seem to switch to being good once they go evil.

I would love it if someone could share a counterexample. I want it to be true that companies don't just turn evil but can become better too.

Once a single bad egg gets into upper management, the core of the company slowly becomes poisoned by similar folk who they employ and rot the company from the inside out.

Psychopaths (shown here)[1] show up where ever there is money and power, make life shit for all the better / empathetic staff, who end up leaving, gut the place and move onto the next company once it's trashed.

[1] https://pics.me.me/ha-ha-business-pig-roll-com-guys-i-havent...

Your problem is you think companies are good to begin with. Companies exist to make money. Nothing more or less.

Companies don't have to be shady, scummy, scammy, and customer-hostile to make money. They may make more money in the short term if they are, but in the long term people will avoid that company and it'll lose money.

How about Microsoft?

Would you like to upgrade to windows 11? You said no so I'll offer it again on the very next screen and give no way to turn off the nag

Would you like to login to your own computer with an online microsoft account - again no way to turn off the nag

Want to exit Teams or Onedrive? nag

And both m$ an google (via chrome) are scanning your computer for executables - for your safety of course!

Sadly I see similar behaviour from Apple on iOS.

When they change the terms of iCloud use the options are agree or the passive aggressive “Maybe be latter”.

That really means we’ll keep asking you until you agree.

Any company using the phrase “maybe latter” instead of “no” is not one you can trust.

To be honest, ToS is a bit different thing. You have no right to use services without accepting it at some point.

Surely, we should be able to reject and turn off the service though if the terms change? i.e. "I don't and agree and don't want this."

Unless they have made the system unfunctional wihout it… which is an another topic of discussion.

Stuffing bloatware on Windows, using dark patterns to try and get you to use Edge. Trying to force you to use you online accounts rather than local accounts. The whole doing good was just usual PR.

The forced obsolescence with Windows 11 designed purely to help Intel sell hardware at the cost of the planet's well-being was pretty evil.

For a second it seemed like they might be headed that way, but nope. They've made some fairly user-hostile decisions recently, at least IMO.

They have thrown the VSCode and WSL candies to the world and most of us don't notice anymore that they keep behaving as they always did.

You mean the metric hog that can only be turned off with a recompile? No, thanks.

Wsl, the barely usable product with breaking bugs, such as simple disk io, until wsl2 came to improve _some_ of the features? Nah.

The most detrimental change to IT, containers, still depends on hyper-v for networking in the latest version and can only build for the same kernel.

Cheap PR for garbage products to try and push PC monopoly.

They have been extremely successful with VSCode. I keep using emacs but nearly everybody I work with switched to VSCode. It even happened that a guy told me on a call "why doesn't your VSCode show [something]?" "Because emacs can show that but I don't care so I didn't install the package."

And yes, the people using Windows and deploying to Linux use WSL2 now instead of WSL. They used to run a Linux VM or dual boot. Another success for Microsoft. WSL2 can also run GUI applications. They'll end up controlling the Linux desktop.

Firstly, Windows is getting progressively more complex. Each new version seems to have a new ux. I help some old family members with their computers and they have a hard time knowing what’s what when I bring them a new pc.

Secondly, I found it very difficult to install another browser like chrome. It wouldn’t let me install chrome unless I downloaded a specific app from Microsoft store to allow my machine to use another browser besides edge. All the while closing annoying pop ups about how edge is just like chrome.

I’m done with their products.

You're confusing good with good PR.

still evil

On the other side, DuckDuckGo is becoming pretty reasonable. I now only need to flip back to google for some hard to search technical topics. DDG also brings up a ton more of the old internet, you get way more variety in the search results.

I have been using DDG for years. I inadvertently used google for a search (damn browser defaults) and i was genuinely difficult to find something relevant with the amount of ads cluttering it up.

Yea I’m always amazed when I inadvertently search via Google for something these days.

Yeah, whenever I end up on google for whatever reason I get a nag screen to try to trick me into agreeing to their tracking crap (with no easy way to say "fuck off, no") and it seems to come back very frequently. I use ddg pretty much exclusively now.

There are Firefox extensions that hide the ads which make a huge difference to search quality.

I fall back to !g when I don't find what I'm looking for. It happens too often for technical things. And Google is the only one that handles "verbatim searches". At least I'm splitting my trail of data between two companies.

I hear people say this but I haven't even desired to use a !g for several years now (good riddance). I wonder if it is for certain types of tech.

I found an example right now.

I looked on DDG for _ubuntu turn on a usb disk after it was switched off_ and it didn't return anything related to the query. I added !g and Google gave me [1] as the second result.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1626369/power-off-external-d...

It’s common for “ambiguous search terms” similar to “python database”.

I’d bet that an experienced ddg user might have workarounds for this kind of thing. I’ve certainly found adding a few extra terms gives me what I need.

Will they stay reasonable? "DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs."

Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model. I've seen it too many times: offer nice free things until you have enough users, and then start squeezing. Bait and switch.

At this point I'm more interested in internet search that isn't reliant on the goodwill and dignity of a private company.

> Today I'm quite skeptical of any business that doesn't have a proper business model.

But they have? DDG was founded 13 years ago...

And "bussiness model": https://wikiless.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo?lang=en#Business_model And: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-does-duckduckgo-make-money...

I've been using Brave search. It's actually a change for the better, too.

Brave search is crap. It feels like DDG when it first launched. I want to like it, but the index it uses is old. I often get links that don't work.

I use Brave and ddg (depending on browser). Brave is only worse when it comes to location specific searches, otherwise for general searches I'm agnostic between the two.

Still fallback to !g bangs on every couple of days.

I've gotten several results were the link is no longer valid.

I may be wrong or naive, but I see this move (offer search history that won't be used for advertising) as a good one. Looks like they are finally trying to diversify their business models and have their users as customers, not product.

If true, that means our social pressure on Google (and Facebook, collaterally) is working, and we should keep applying it.

Still, it defaults to on, so if history is turned off and you miss the email, it will now be silently turned on.

The right thing to do would be to pop up a question asking if I want to opt in, keeping it to off if dismissed.

Considering all the other blocking modals Google is forcing me through as part of CAPTCHA when surfing the web, that should not be a big deal.

Opting an existing user into data retention without asking them is never defensible, and I imagine this will result in heavy fines in the EU down the line (after all, private individuals can be Workspace admins as well, it’s not strictly used by businesses)

The problem to me isn't that they flipped the Don't Be Evil Bit off, but that they have to ability to turn it on and off. Giving any entity this much power is a bad idea in the first place. Even if they do not presently abuse it, eventually someone will. And that is not something I want to pass on to future generations.

They are monopolizing evil too now!!

The sad truth is that the average person won't care

It's easy to say this, mainly because the average person really just doesn't care.

When has Google ever been the champion of user experience? Their core product is barely usable without an adblocker.

Gmail was a way, way, way better experience than Hotmail or anything else when it started (and even almost a decade later). Maps blew everyone's mind at launch too and instantly made an entire group of direction and mapping websites irrelevant. Google Earth was magical just spending hours trotting around the globe too. Reader (RIP) was by far the best RSS reader.

Maps and Earth were not in-house built but purchased.

Maps was amazing at first and then it got ruined bit by bit. But somewhere along the way it got awesome again. I think it's really good right now.

WAIT WHAT?

[real time search ongoing]

Goodness how have I not known this?!

Yep, I had Earthviewer 3D installed on my PC before Google Earth was a thing.

The maps guys then pushed on to even greater heights with … Google Wave…

> Gmail was a way, way, way better experience than Hotmail or anything else when it started

I recall seeing it as sluggish and awkward when I finally decided to check it, abusing Ajax. Other web interfaces (that I tried) were more lightweight and predictable, and regular mail clients I found to be a much better UX. So I've mostly attributed Gmail popularity to Google promoting it, possibly using that invite-only policy to make the users to spread the invitations. It sounds like at least some users actually liked it, but I don't think it's a clear example of a good service by Google.

Don't forget the other advantage of Gmail over other webmail hosts back then: the amount of free disk space they gave to every account was HUGE. And if you wanted regular mail clients, IIRC Gmail always allowed you to use a traditional mail client, both over IMAP and over POP3.

Definitely in the 90s and early 2000s at least, possibly longer. That was part of their thing, being the champion of user experience.

Early Google set themselves apart with the user experience. For example, Google Search's homepage's simplicity was astonishing at the time; a direct inverse of the bloated pages most of their competitors at the time favored (Yahoo, Alta Vista, AOL, and Dogpile were pretty bad if I remember correctly, and Ask Jeeves was somewhere in the middle. The others I don't remember as well). GMail may have not been the best technically speaking (I don't know), but from a user standpoint it was cleaner than the alternatives, who would include things like links to news stories in their inboxes.

I recommended people use Google in part because there was, at the time, less risk of them clicking on something and being confused by it. (Why is there news in my email? Where's my email? How do I search?)

On the other hand, now search for “bicycles” on Google.

Oh, there's a reason that I said 'recommended' past tense. ;)