Google's Grey Goo problem

[mouser]

Interesting reading..
And depressing how much of this world is becoming about advertising..

Over the past eighteen months, Google has come to resemble a tacky PC utilities vendor, so it was particularly refreshing to hear Brin admit Google had overdone the Beta label too. Implicit in that observation is the admission that much of the non-search development is of dubious quality.
But it isn't the desktop gizmos that bother you. It's search - and if executives want to measure the extent of the company's fall from grace, they only need read our postbag in response to the chaos caused by the "Big Daddy" update.
The problem is, Google has created a commons that is designed to be exploited beyond its capacity...
...
Many people have waxed lyrical about how Google was "God's Brain" and contained some sort of magical Gestalt of all of mankind's knowledge. But now it's like an autistic brain that can't say anything except advertising jingles.
...
It is striking to see how, in both cases, MS and Google software got mugged by evil-doers. MS insecure code is routinely exploited by malware authors, and Google's vaunted PageRank is tricked and exploited by spammers and fake site owners. On the Internet, anything that can be exploited will be.

http://www.theregist...le_grey_goo_letters/

from DailyRotation

[zridling]

Great find. And yet the very Register page has multiple Google ads on it! I've always thought all of Google's software to be sub-par. Even Picasa hasn't been touched since they bought it. But if you do a search for "Great books" my site is fourth the list, and for "Great software" I'm first. And I don't have a single ad on my pages, woohoo!

[mouser]

Another look at google as a controversial company..

In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one

http://www.economist...cfm?story_id=6911096

from digg.com

[wuwei23]

It also helps to take any article Andrew Orlowski writes about Google with a huge heaped tablespoon of salt. He's kinda lost any claim of journalistic neutrality when it comes to covering them, as he has a tendency to distort whatever he can to show that a) they're evil and b) they're gonna collapse. He especially likes to create pathetic straw men - data overload and unconstrained, self-replicating nanotech are nothing alike - and now seems to be attracting like-minded readers:

Many people have waxed lyrical about how Google was "God's Brain"...

Most people I know like to wax lyrical about how it's really a "search engine".