"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

"We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."

"Most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'"

The criminally insane Eric Smith, former CEO of Google

This text is not supposed to "list everything bad about Google", but, once again, simply seeks to entice its audience into at least questioning this big, ugly de facto monopoly which, in comparison, makes Microsoft at its worst look like an innocent little puppy.

I'm aware of how most/all big companies work. The reason I'm not writing about British Petrol, McDonald's, Monsanto or something like that, is that anyone with half a brain already knows that they are evil, whereas Google controls the digital world to such an extreme degree, doing such awful things, while being cheered on by the lobotomized sheeple (no offence… well, some!) and hoisted to the sky by comfortable, cowardly, dumb "journalists". I very rarely hear anyone questioning or bashing Google, and since I don't get paid a dime for anything I write or make on my site, I have no conflict of interest. (It's not like Google is providing any ads on this page, or sends me any traffic to speak of.)

Their newspeak-esque motto, "Don't be evil", should give anyone who is not completely brainwashed the creeps. Microsoft may have been aggressive toward other companies, but they never treated their customers as a commodity like Google. It's tiring and sad to see the non-stop, mindless praise of the evil Googlempire while Microsoft is perpetually the "bad guys", largely undeservingly, if you see to the quality of much of what they produced and sold, rather than pretending that it's free while taking your soul as payment.

(And yes, I know that Microsoft has been attempting similar things in later years, such as with Bing, Xbox One and some disturbing rumors about government/NSA cooperation with their cloud services and maybe even their Windows operating systems. I'm mostly talking about this in a historical sense and what people traditionally have hated Microsoft for. I'm not some one-sided Microsoft lover.)

The beginning

Around 2000 AD and a few years onward, Google was cool. Ask virtually any geek. In chat rooms, "google it", "google is your friend" or simply "google" was (and, unfortunately, remains) an extremely common response among lazy, arrogant assholes, similar to the old "RTFM" ("Read The Fucking Manual"). The search engine's home page was the browser start page on countless computers, including mine; I was one of those who found them really awesome, initially buying into the hype and their bullshit. Shamefully.

I don't have much to back up this claim with, but I have a strong feeling that the "geek love" is what basically shoved the search engine down the throats of the average users, who also had no reason to dislike it due to its relative simplicity and seemingly relevant results. I honestly believe that this was a huge reason why they grew so insanely big, so quickly. It was really heavily promoted by the average computer-savvy person.

Sky-rocketing

As always, it's much easier to look back on something and analyze it than seeing what's happening when you're in the middle of it. Today, it seems obvious what they tried to do all along, but it cannot be denied that their core product, Google Search, was better than the competitors. Combined with the non-bloated interface and constant spam on IRC and elsewhere by unwitting geeks, nothing could stop their train of (well concealed) cancer.

Google became something of the "un-Microsoft" in the eyes of the Linux penguins. They weren't this "evil", old behemoth — they were the young, hip company with dream-like employee benefits. They definitely flirted with the geeks all along, from running Linux to encouraging and paying their drones to spend time on personal projects each week. Who could dislike that? Surely they did it out of the kindness of their heart because they really care about open source and their workers, right?

They started creating random projects to the left and to the right, often simply buying an existing company, renaming it to Google Whatever and running it into the ground by having absolutely no clue about how to do anything except their core Search product. This pattern has continued and will likely continue until their eventual demise. Never mind all the people who are negatively affected by it at every step. Ahem. Microsoft. "Embrace, extend and extinguish", anyone?

Some projects, such as Google Gmail (let a commercial entity read and store all your e-mails), Google AdSense (sell your soul for a few measly ad bucks) or AdWords (pay tons of money for a few measly clicks from bots or irrelevant visitors), were somehow more successful and stable. The latter two were and remain extremely important to the core business whereas the former allowed massive amounts of users to be tied to them and who would remain in their claws.

Total arrogance

Although it is of course very common for big companies and huge corporations to make themselves hard to reach for the ordinary person lacking massive amounts of cash to spend on lawyers or other means of poking through their thick walls of legal bullshit, Google is a special case in this regard. Why? Because they are not making bottles and cans of soda pop which they sell to resellers, or serving hamburgers and fries in a restaurant. They are very much an IT company, hosting more content in more ways that you (probably) could imagine, directly affecting huge parts of the Internet-connected human population.

It is not possible to contact Google. I've tried many times, in many ways. Unless you know somebody working there, or maybe you're some kind of journalist at a big newspaper with special connections, or have the financial means to force them to listen to you, it's like screaming in outer space. This is a company which really, really doesn't want anyone to contact them for any reason. They have streamlined all of their services and "help sections" toward making it as hard as at all possible to even find any kind of form where you can type actual English text as opposed to checking check boxes and answering fixed questions with fixed answers, and even when you do, they are very clear about the fact that if this is not 100% relevant to whatever the form is for, they will ignore it. And they sure do. Think you'll find a working e-mail address for support/contact, or some kind of general form? Forget it.

They also encourage you to post your problem in public, to "other community members". Nobody in their right mind would do that for any private/sensitive issue, which is usually the only reason why you would want to contact them in the first place.

Google hosts massive amounts of content. Huge parts of this is either plain illegal or "just" violates their own stated Terms of Service. Google is extremely well aware of this. It's their business model. Their business model is to host and make available any content, because they can get away with it, and ignore the people it affects negatively. Because they can, and it's making them a profit. They can do it because the general public doesn't care. That's always how scum get away with doing evil things.

YouTube is just one Google site based entirely on hosting and serving copyrighted material. Hardly anyone comes to YouTube for the original content. They also host countless other problematic services, such as archives of newsgroup discussions, copyrighted images, videos on their old Google Videos, websites on Google Sites, blogs on Google Blogger, and so on for about one million different services which may or may not be around tomorrow. If you are stupid enough to have a "Google account" with many of their services tied to it, you may one day find that you've been locked out of your entire "sphere", for whatever reason. Good luck appealing that.

Most of their content actually has some kind of "report" feature, but the problem is that those reports are filed in the trash can. You see, Google is for democracy. And who in their right mind would be against democracy? Are you some kind of a commie?! Maybe a Nazi?! No, of course not. Democracy is the perfect religion, and it works perfectly. If not enough people find something objectionable, it isn't illegal and doesn't violate their terms. And vice versa. Great logic, huh? Because as we all know, the majority is always right.

And don't give me some bullshit about them not having the means to verify every video uploaded to YouTube prior to publishing it (at least for new/untrusted accounts; trusted accounts could be post-screened), or manually blacklisting/whitelisting domains on their search engine, or at least having properly trained support people available who listen to you and who can escalate serious issues; they have the resources, and there shouldn't be any question about it. The only reason they continue with their sickening practices is that they are allowed to do so. And if they really couldn't do it while still making a profit, who gives a shit? I sure as hell don't care about them making a profit by ignoring common decency. If you can't do it right, don't do it at all.

Punishing account owners for what others do

Although this is a minor issue in the context, and could have (and has) happened with any other scumbag company, I simply cannot write an anti-Google article without mentioning this personal experience (out of many) as an example. I had had a Google AdSense account for years, since the early days. Knowing perfectly well what a nightmare it is for the many people who have lost their accounts and thus were unable to make any money on advertisements (since they have a de facto monopoly), I was extremely careful never to do anything that could violate their terms. I had studied them in detail and listened to many discussions about them and knew exactly what to do, including never even showing the ads to myself (and of course not clicking them).

Even so, one day I got the feared "Your account has been disabled" e-mail from Google where they simply said something about my account being a danger to their advertisers. They never explained in greater detail what this was about, and ignored my multiple appeal requests (they actually had one of those custom forms for it). The only reasonable explanation is that idiots must've clicked on the ads repeatedly, either maliciously or "to help out" (I had certainly not encouraged anyone, since it's definitely not allowed), causing them to assume that it was some kind of fraud orchestrated by me. They don't care either way. There were simply "fake clicks" detected, so they killed the account. No warning. Nothing I could do to prevent it. No explanation. Good bye.

The value of keeping bookmarks and interacting with human beings

Knowing how the Web and the world works, I'm not surprised when 99-100% of the results for any keyword or series of keywords are completely useless spam. When I need suggestions, I ask real people. Also, there is this little feature called "bookmarking" which you can use in the Web browser to avoid searching for things you already know about. It's amazing how people just trust some global corporation with all their data and have no problems constantly telling them what they are doing by typing it out in the NSA terminal (AKA search engine).

If you still need to search for something, try using a different engine just for the sake of not further supporting Google; DuckDuckGo or whatever you want. (I never claimed that there is something technically better. That is not the point here.)

To sum things up

It's the many little things. They are difficult to summarize and describe to somebody who thinks that this is a "paranoid delusion". As I originally wrote this, Google just announced that they are updating and combining all of their "privacy policy" documents into a single one, at the same time going even further in combining all of their services to track you to the extreme. Do yourself a favour and at least stay away from Google+ and generally being logged in to your Google account (if you must have one) while doing things. If you use YouTube, Google has lately been trying to force you to enter your full real name. Don't succumb to the pressure. Of course, this is just very quick, basic advice. You probably need to change your entire way of thinking.

Google is definitely not "your friend" (another slogan chanted frequently by the zombies). Google does evil, all the time. Google does not give a shit about your privacy. Google has no "noble" interests; everything they do is purely intended to help them rape your privacy, for profit and power. Google doesn't give you anything "for free". You are the product and Google laughs the whole way to the bank. Please do not promote Google anymore. They are not "the lesser of two evils", whatever the second party may be. Try to circumvent as many Google services and associations as you can, and help others remove their Google tentacles.

And don't forget to keep your eyes open.

Now what?