Everybody knows Google: it’s the site you visit when you want to find something online, or, depending on your viewpoint, it is the evil corporation that is mining data on your daily Internet searches. But how well do you really know Google?
Enter Douglas Edwards, a former Google employee who took part in the company’s major corporate ascent and, in a recent tell-all book available on Amazon, has shared his Google experience. What he mentions may surprise you. Here are 6 things you may not know or remember about good old (young to us) Google.
Google Tool Bar Grapples with the “Don’t be Evil” Credo
“We’re talking free extra data here. While knowing the PageRank of a page might have only nominal value to users, knowing the sites users visited would be tremendously valuable to Google.”
“I thought it was an enormous privacy tradeoff. I knew we planned to anonymize the data and wouldn’t match the list of visited sites to a user’s identity. Still, it felt creepy to me and I figured I wouldn’t be the only one.”