Google used to have a mantra, as much as massive global corporations can have mantras: "don't be evil." But the people in charge got rid of it after 18 years. It was now okay to be evil.
More recently, they hired Timnit Gebru to focus on ethical AI issues, yet when she did, they fired her. Apparently, the people in charge of Google's AI want unethical AI.
And on a more personally noticeable level, they changed their mobile search app. No longer is it streamlined and simple, emphasizing speed and focus and, one hoped, accuracy and usefulness of the results. Now it's a news app with a general search function included. This in itself is not a huge problem, what they pass off as news is. About half of the stories are trashy clickbait, not designed to inform but instead designed to manipulate the inbuilt curiosity of the human mind and create "engagement" and advertising revenue. So it's no longer about providing reliable and useful information to the user, it's about providing the user to the advertisers. Much like was said of television advertising, "if the product is free, you're the product."
How this is not a major blow to their original branding, I don't know. Perhaps the DoubleClick people have taken over and they don't care. At this rate, I am seriously debating dropping Chrome completely, I had started using it years ago for its security features.
I don't mean that Google will suddenly cease to exist. The Google we used to have, however, is gone. The thing with the search app is so upsetting, and the clickbait is so trashy and so transparent, that I am motivated to write a blog post about it. You know it's bad if I'm writing about it.
