Google is evil

Bill Weinberg

Google appears to have eliminated the foreign country news page links from the bottom of the Google News page. World War 4 Report depends on these links intimately for our work. How are we supposed to access those pages now? How are we supposed to do a search for Mexican, Colombian, Pakistani, etc. news sources? Who’s brilliant idea was this? Why can’t anyone just leave well enough alone? Haven’t they ever heard “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Or is it some conspiracy to limit bloggers and researchers to the dumbed-down American media?

And when we tried to get support on the phone, we were basically told they could not take the complaint over the phone, and when we asked to speak to the operator’s supervisor, she flat out refused, saying it violated company policy! “Don’t Be Evil”?!?! We think we’ve come up with a better corporate slogan for Google:

We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To Care. We’re Google.

Fuck You.

See our last post on the politics of cyberspace.

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  1. FYI
    Research reveals that if you hit the page news.google.com – directly next to the top stories and bellow the logo at the TOP OF THE PAGE there is a drop down menu with the label ‘Personalized News’ – pulling this menu down reveals a rather long list of countries. Clicking on a country takes you to a page of news from that country. It is interesting, if off topic, to note that Sweden is not in this list of countries. Draw your own conclusions …

    Now the argument can be made that drop down menus are evil but this is the wrong forum for that thread.

    1. Thank you, doctor
      Thank you for pointing that out. At least there is still a way to access the pages. However:

      1. Drop-down menus may not be “evil,” but they are definitely less convenient, making you click twice, accelerating your descent into carpal tunnel syndrome.

      2. How were we supposed to figure that out? ESP? They couldn’t even put a note where the old links used to be?

      So my question still stands:

      Why can’t anyone just leave well enough alone?

      1. drop downs are borderline evil
        > 2. How were we supposed to figure that out? ESP? They couldn’t even put a note where the old links used to be?

        Good point about the note. I suspect incompetence rather than malice.