You've probably heard of the offensive doctored Michelle Obama photos floating around the Internet, appearing highly ranked on Google. I'm not going to link to it, and that's not really the point.
The point is Google's arrogance toward the public. I think their attitude is simply not acceptable from a major corporation, especially an advertising-supported one. From their own explanation:
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results.
They seem to think that as long as it's a computer making decisions and as long as it makes money, the rest of us should just shut up.
Name another media company that could get away with something that brazen.
Google is not a software company or a high-tech company. It is an advertising company. That is where they get all their revenue. Everything else is losing money, a gamble that some idea one of their engineers thought was cool might eventually find a market. As a software engineer myself, I think this is unfortunate in two ways.
(1) Companies that might develop a product that could make money simply don't because not even a great product can compete against a free Google beta. In an anti-trust context, this is called dumping, using your monopoly or near-monopoly in one area (advertising) to compete in an unrelated business (cloud computing, smartphones).
(2) Advertising money that used to support things like journalism now go to half-baked software instead of improved we content. Google's profit margins on advertising are reported to be 70%. At best, newspapers in their heyday had 25% margins. Now, content creators get less than 30% of the advertising revenue, and that has to cover their costs and their profits.
What do we need more of? Another smartphone operating system, or journalists covering state government? As it stands, a company where a friend works has to get out of the phone OS business because they can't charge for their product anymore, so it's bad for technology companies. And people who write for newspapers who use Google for their advertising can't afford to keep their staff.
One reason the App Store from Apple is so successful is because Apple decided to take 30% as its cut instead of the 60% or 70% that carriers had demanded from developers up until that point. When creative people can make a profit, creativity thrives.
It is completely Google's decision about how much profit to take from Internet advertising. Why is journalism not thriving? One obvious explanation, perhaps not the only one, is that the dominant advertising network takes such a high share of advertising revenue that online news can't thrive. Sure, it makes money for Google, but the days when newspapers put all their content online for free because it's the early days of the Internet and they have to get out there are long gone.
And it is completely a human being's decision about whether to surrender editorial choices to a computer algorithm. The belief that a computer is somehow better or more objective than a human being is itself a subjective, human opinion, and certainly not provable one way or another.
The good thing about an advertising company is that it most certainly is beholden to what the general public thinks. Someone ought to teach them that.