Google has taken much from the Linux community, and we've in turn have enjoyed a very nice search engine. But I think that Google is now starting to do evil. For instance, Google has recently filed several trivial software patents, one of them being the highlighting of search text. There is no innovation there.

More recently, Google has turned on the very foundation of its strength by placing code in their toolbar which rewrites html and points to ads at Amazon.com. This is a betrayal to the Linux community, and to webmasters in general.

For reference please read:
itworld.com/Tech/2987/nls_ecommercegoogle050301/

Uh, that URL needs a www in front of it to work, but the forum would not let me post that.

I can post links - just so everyone has it: http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/nls...egoogle050301/

I can't see any reason to turn our backs on Google - with the wave this is creating, I got money that says it gets rejected.
Google has helped the open-source community to such an extent (reliable, fast search results, google.com/linux, google.com/bsd) that I think we owe it to Google to give them a chance to fix their blunder, and should realize that, in the end, they'll do what they think is right.

It isn't what the toolbar does to the webpage, it is what it does to the web. This is the beginning of a slippery slope which will eventually pave the way for Microsoft to embed SmartTags into MSIE.

Fast forward and we will have embedded ads competing with online ads and many of your favorite sites will end up having to close down because they will not be able to pay for their hosting services.

The mom and pops and web publishers will be the first to suffer.

For those who do not know, Microsoft tried to do this back in 2001 and and they will have the green light to try again. Google and Microsoft must have a deal because Microsoft owns the patent on this technology. That is the stinker that so many people are missing.

AutoLinks is step one in a plan to funnel billions of dollars to the major portals. In the end, they will be perfectly wedged in between the major retailers and the consumers. This is a very subtle power grab.

If you love the Internet, you better be worried.

Let me ask a question: What Linux web browser do you use? Firefox Perhaps? Who do you thing is funding Firefox's development?

I'm not sure what to think about Google yet, but one thing is certain: the Open Source community can't just walk away from them.
Keep a very close eye on them? Yes.
Forget about them? No.

Off-topic board question (I don't mean to hijack this thread but I'm morbidly curious): why does rayban's profile report 0 posts, and yet there are three in this thread alone? I'd think that even if the profile were static for each post (it isn't) that it would have incremented with each post he made.

On topic: I'm more partial to Yahoo lately. Google has seemingly been too preoccupied with the IPO to worry about filtering out and banning cloakers, linkfarms, and doorway pages, whereas Yahoo has actively been rearchitecting their search engine, actively punting cloakers and linkfarmers and doorway pages from their index, and doing their darndest to return relavent hits to inquiries.

KimVette, posts in General do not count toward your post count.

--jeremy

By using the excellent and feature rich MSN search instead?
No, I do not think I will be "turning" on Google yet.
Interesting choice for a first post though.

don't like their toolbar? why use it?

Not true.

The Google toolbar is something you download yourself, by choice. For MS to embed SmartTags would be an abuse of their monopoly.

Even if it does exactly the same thing, it's still very different for a monoploy to force something on you than it is for a third party to offer it to you as a download.

As for patents, with today's climate, they'd be idiotic not to get themselves some patents to defend themselves with if another company tries to get them on patent infringement. It's only if they start using them against other organisations themselves that we should worry.