Comments on: What Was Google Thinking?

By: Harry Lewis

Harry Lewis — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:01:44 +0000

Arvind, ;maybe you’re right — if you want ALL the world’s information, that had better include the database of who is friends with whom. And yet Google does pick and choose which information it decides to warehouse. It is not, for example, trying to be the repository for the world’s banking information, for example. It is going after personal health records but not hospital databases. And in general it’s actually pretty sensitive to privacy. Without knowing anything about this except what I read in public sources, it feels like there was a management failure here, as though this project got launched prematurely and without review by the right people.

Sawyer, take a look at my post on this
http://www.bitsbook.com/2010/01/vaidhyanathan-on-china/
which points back to an earlier post and a debate in which I was engaged. It’s certain,y not a simple question, but I think Google will do more good by getting out, and I give them credit for passing on the money they could make there.

By: Sawyer

Sawyer — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:30:10 +0000

Without Google, the Chinese are forced to use Baidu, which is securely in the Government’s pocket. Baidu pacifies the people with pirated videos of American Television shows instead of offering quality search results. After living in China and speaking with various students, I feel totally comfortable declaring that baidu is worthless for important researching and fact finding. I recognize it’s admirable of google to slap the chinese government across it’s censoring mouth.. but the end result is really just harming the people, who now have even less information at their disposal.

By: Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:42:34 +0000

My article has a possible explanation of what Google might have been thinking: they kinda knew this was coming, but getting a social network kick-started was so commercially valuable to them that they decided to do it anyway. That's only speculation, but I haven't seen a better explanation.