Google: don't be evil

Google has shown its true colours and, like so many before, have abandoned the noble principles upon which they were founded in favour of market share and dividend. I am talking, of course about the search engine supplied by Google to China which supports the restriction of searches for information which is censored by the Chinese Government. I don't get wound up by many things, but hypocrisy is one of them. A company which purports itself to be based on noble precepts should stick to them. Google does not have the responsibility to ensure that information gets on to the web, but it does have the responsibility as a search engine to be able to find what is there. The whole idea of Google is that if the page is deemed important by other web users, then the page will get on top of the rankings. If one of these pages happens to be censored by the Chinese government, then the Chinese will be closed off from what everyone else apparently finds incredibly important.

So, follow the link, read about what Google are doing. Go ahead and cut and paste the letter to Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) and send it. It will take you a few moments and cost you one sheet of A4 paper, a bit of ink and less than one euro postage (€0.81 to be exact). Ironically the link has a page rank of 6. I wonder if the Chinese will be getting it; probably not if Google has anything to do with it.

Furthermore, I realise that I am also being a hypocrite, using a Google based blog site and also Google ads, so I will shortly be migrating to another blog site; the ads, as you can see, have already been removed.