Google turns Evil (capital E)

further to the other day:

have a read of this. It's ok, I'll wait. So Google buys 5% of AOL, no biggie. However, read the fine print of the agreement a bit closer, and it becomes apparent: Google has become more evil than Microsoft (in this arena, at least - and unlike their much vaunted principles). (more on their evilness here, and here)

so how to voice displeasure?

well, you could leave them a comment (although they won't reply - it says so)

so what else? well, here's a way:

for linux:
here's a batch script. copy it somewhere on a linux box (anything with bash & lynx installed), chmod+x it, and run ./informgoogle

the content is very simple, it just does this:

#!/bin/bash

while [ true ]; do
  lynx -dump 'http://www.google.com/search?
hl=en&q=google+stupid+preferential+aol+placement+evil
&btnG=Search' > /dev/null 2>&1
  echo "google informed of opinion at `date`"
done

of course you can edit the url to send any message you like. It uses lynx rather than, say, wget because wget gets a 403 forbidden.

for windows:
here is a windows dos script. you'll also need to download this (right-click save them both). Put them in a directory together somewhere, and run informgoogle.bat. Unless you've put url2exe in the path (eg C:\, C:\windows, c:\temp, etc), you'll need to open a dos window to do this. start - run "cmd" (without quotes). then type cd "whereever you saved the files". then informgoogle.bat<ENTER>

the URL2FILE exe is just a cool little freeware app I found. It just saves whatever URL you specify out to a file (which we then delete, but hey). There's more about it here (the official website)

the content of the windows dos file is pretty simple too:

:start
@url2file "http://www.google.com/search?
hl=en&q=google+stupid+aol+bannerad+evil&btnG=Search" deleteme.htm
@del /q deleteme.htm
@echo google informed of opinion at %time% %date%
@goto start

note the slightly different url? It's that easy to change (just keep a + between each word). Send any message you like, and it'l show up in Google's logs.

what will it look like? something like this:



because, frankly, somewhere there HAS to wake up and realise: polluting the results with advertising, particularly AOL (home of the stupidest people on the net), banner ads, unlabelled ads.. I don't care what the business reason, it's all EVIL.

Two small notes. Both urls have been broken in half (so the page isn't crazy wide). If you're c&ping these, rather than downloading the scripts, you'll need to join them back together. Running these scripts will just keep hitting the same page, over and over. It'll use up bandwidth - although no more than hitting refresh on a browser (which is basically what it's doing). However, if Google decide to get even more evil, they may decide to block your IP if you leave it running for days. Best to leave it on for a bit, then switch it off. They'll get the message, eventually.

There may be ways to improve these scripts, feel free to offer suggestions.