Google News

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This month, Googlestopped being a company that gives people what they want and, dispensing with niceties,became a company that forces its services on everyone. Three bold (and frankly stupid)moves have provoked the ire of everyone but its board.The first move wasforcing new Google users into Google+ so that anyone using Gmail or YouTube wouldinstantly register hits on Google+, despite never using the service. The most recent movewas Google’s announcement that it will be sharing more user data between servicesand almost all will fall under a unified user license term. The motivation is obvious:Your personalinformation is valuable and Google gets to sell it while pretending you use all theother services like Google+.In another recent desperate move, Google startedpromoting its Google+ social network results over Facebookand Twitter in web search results. Google claims the latter is due to unresolved termswith Twitter, but forgive me if I’m cynical in thinking it’s become one ofthose good problems, not one it's eager to solve. This is the first time I’ve everbeen tempted to use Bing. Sure, the irony of opting for a Microsoft service as the moreprivate and fair option isn’t lost on me, but I’m interested in searchresults, not Google results. Microsoft may be late to the open standards love parade, butit beats backtracking, and, hey, it indexes tweets.It’s hard to defendsuch a stark break from objectivity, something people assumed was Google’s strength-- you searched the internet, it showed a relatively unedited version of that. Notanymore. Some people have called this the “portalization” of Google. Google,meet AltaVista, the other search engine of yore. Continue Reading

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