Google
Google is a giant company, arguably the one today with the broadest range of
state-of-the-art information (and other) technology and content and with innovative
forays into tomorrow's technology. Their scope is way too broad to cover in a few
paragraphs, so we refer you to an
overview of Google, while we focus here on some of their activities that have
the largest audiences, and thus the most impact when there are bloopers.
Google's most admirable traits include the following:
• Their enormous technological capability
• Their love for information (demonstrated early in their large-scale book
scanning efforts)
• Their general openness, far different from the closedness of companies
like Apple
• Their willingness to try new technologies, some of them far out and not
obviously related to their main focus, shelving them if they don't produce results
And their least admirable traits include the following:
• Their central focus on advertisements, admittedly their main revenue engine
• Their opaque search criteria, partly justified to protect their
technology and to avoid spammers
• Their failure to warn about linking services, e.g., automatic reposting
of YouTube posts on Google+
• Their offering users chances to fix Google errors (e.g., in Maps or
Translate), then ignoring advice
• Their failure to provide adequate instructions for uploading to YouTube