[psbp]

"That's an opinion, but I no longer fall for Google's kool aid...and yes, there's some boomerang from having drunk it earlier on."

Why does everyone who's despondent towards Google act like the company is some sort of abusive ex-boyfriend?

[zevyoura]

I think it's a natural reaction when your opinion on a subject shifts drastically towards the negative; when you've 'grown out of' an opinion it seems silly that anyone else could still hold it afterwards.

[k3n]

I think it's natural as an initial reaction, but becomes unhealthy when obsessed over, whether it's an ex-boyfriend, Google, or even theism.

[OGinparadise]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_tu,_Brute%3F

Google claimed a lot of things but generally the theme was "We're nice, ethical...trust us with monopoly power, we'll be considerate...blah blah" and people believed it, helping them get even more market share. IMO they seriously abused that power especially in the past 2-3 years, only to fatten their wallet http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/10/google... at the expense of websites that provide the content for Google Search. It's not merely academic, well meaning small businesses lost everything they had, and then some.

If I /we were stupid to believe that, and if "Google doesn't owe you any traffic," fine but we sure have the right to voice out our opinions.

[honeybadger3]

You seem to be telling a story about someone who lost website traffic because Google changed their ranking scheme or introduced a competing product. Is this right? If so, what happened, and is that person you?

[jodoglevy]

It wasn't just Google changing their rankings (to manually put their own results ahead of competitors), they were also scraping data from these competitors and displaying it as their own, which they continued to do after the FTC told them to stop.

Here's a good summary of some of Google's questionable practices around search (disclaimer: I wrote this for a class in college): http://thechronicle.github.io/blog/2012/06/01/dont-be-evil/