Google Evilness scale curious but flawed |
It’s become a cliche talking about how evil or not Google is over certain moves the company makes. Playing off the company motto of do no evil prompted Ugo Cei to create evilornot.info, which allows readers to rate Google’s evilness scale. Er, well, at least that seems to be the intention of the site, actual execution is another matter entirely.
According to the stats shown above evilornot.info has already taken in some 4,600 evilness votes. A rating of 0% evil means Google is 100% good (not confused yet, keep reading). So the over-under means 50% is … ok?
There are only 5 choices: 0, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% evil. Would be better I think if it was a white/blue to flaming red evil slider which allowed the full 100 percentile. Perhaps Ugo will consider this idea not heinous? I’m starting to feel like I’m in a Bill and Ted movie writing this piece, swapping out evil for heinous.
Evilornot.info is at its heart is little more than a niche RSS aggregator homing in on the “Google” keyword that allows rating of each post. I noticed that several stories about the evilornot.info site were appearing in the list which makes no sense. Really, what does the evilornot.info site have to do with anything Google is doing being evil? Also there are ratings for single posts containing links of multiple stories? How do readers rate posts with more than one story about Google fairly? This says nothing about the duplicate news stories regurgitated by bloggers with little to no additional commentary. Nonsense.
Another bizarre example: the Google Blogoscoped piece that pointed me to this site garnered a 20% evil rating for Google. I suppose the only thing evil — and that’s not even the right word — about Phillip Lenssen’s piece is that he doesn’t mention any of this site’s shortcoming, ending with: “… this should be interesting in a few months.” Ugo shows up in the comments over there to weigh in on his creation, so there is one positive sign.
Despite my commentary here, I actually do like the basic concept of evilornot.info, but some serious work is required to make this site viable. The website could be greatly improved if it had more human intervention to ensure stories were properly vetted, did not use frames for linked articles (which tend to be at least 90% evil themselves) and not post pretty much any article/story/post with the keyword “Google” in it. Oh, and might want to get rid of the Google logo, Ugo, that’s trademarked. I’m not sure the “this site isn’t affiliated with Google” disclaimer will provide adequate protection, but then I’m no patent infringement attorney.
If evilornot.info finds a way to improve the intelligence showing only actual stories — hand picked, perhaps to keep out the dupes and errata– then this might someday be worth a more serious look in the future (stay at it, Udo). In the meantime, for those watching and actually caring about Google evilness will see the same material in your RSS without the need to check a radio button, navigate through frames, and be confused by the fact that 20% evil isn’t really that evil. Or is it?
Confused? Yeah, me too.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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Thanks for yor critique, David. I assure you that it is appreciated.
I agree that a slider would be cool, even though radio buttons require just one click to select, so it’s quicker for users. I am considering changing the labels to something less confusing like “Totally good”, “Almost goood”, “Don’t care”, “Almost evil”, “Totally evil”. What do you think?
As for the Google logo, I read the terms of use and I think I am complying to them, but I’m no lawyer, so I might as well be wrong.
But I think the meat of your objections has to do with editorial overview. That’s indeed a serious problem, but I have no other resources apart from my limited time. As long as I am online I can manually delete irrelevant content and this will probably be enough for now.
Comment by Ugo Cei — January 14, 2006 @ 3:50 am PST
Hi Ugo - thanks for stopping by. A slider can be clickable as well as radio buttons
I think something colorful and visual cold (white/blue) to hot (dark red) is easiest and quickest to understand that I can think of. After all, there’s all those hot or not type sites out there which is essentially what you doing a spinoff on here.
Check into Mechanical Turk, really, maybe that would be a way to free up your time, although you are going to need some revenue to pay for that service and I’m not sure if what you are doing is financially viable. Being a programmer myself I understand and appreciate what you are trying to accomplish here (and I was glad to see that you took my critique constructively, because some folks don’t), but as a reader it’s not really helping with the breakdown of information if there is too much redundancy. Readers want less of their time consumed, not more. So your job, should you continue to choose to accept it, is to save readers time and not confuse them with too many choices. It’s hard enough getting them to rate something, much less rate information which conflicts itself.
Keep at it and let me know if/when you work out something more intelligent. Happy coding to you
Comment by TDavid — January 14, 2006 @ 4:02 am PST
Oh, and BTW, please call me TD or TDavid … you are missing a letter there in my name, lol
Comment by TDavid — January 14, 2006 @ 4:03 am PST
By the way, this is just something that I hacked together in a couple of boring evenings while vacationing and to learn Ruby on Rails. It’s meant to be a fun thing and I have no financial plans around it (of course, if Yahoo! wants to buy it, I’m available to listen
). But I agree that if something is worth doing, it must be done well, so I’ll try to find some more evenings to fix what’s broken.
Thank you.
Comment by Ugo Cei — January 14, 2006 @ 4:15 am PST
check us out. i think you’ll find this interesting.
blog poll on GOOG
http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=google
Comment by James — January 17, 2006 @ 7:55 pm PST
James - that seems to be taking what evilornot is doing and dynamically classifying the stories as positive or negative? I see the same problem with this tool really with an admittedly very quick look. This piece is listed as negative toward Google when in fact it isn’t negative toward Google. If anything I’m commenting negatively on a tool that is about Google.
Comment by TDavid — January 17, 2006 @ 9:03 pm PST