Honan’s declaration of evil is a riff on Google’s famous unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil,” which was apparently proposed by staffers Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel at a 2001 meeting. Google continues to saying that not being evil is one of its core principles to this day. So the fact that Honan and others are saying that the company has finally crossed an ethical line into evilhood is a unique, sad moment in Google history.

Except…

People have been accusing Google of being evil–or at least wondering whether it has become so–for almost as long as Google has been claiming that it isn’t evil. I can’t lay my hands on any examples from 2001 or 2002, but it became a hot topic in 2003 and has never let up.

Consider these pieces of evidence (one for each year!).

Josh McHugh in Wired, January 2003:

Andrew Orlowski, The Register, April 2004:

Preston Gralla on Windows DevCenter, August 2005:

Adam Penenberg in Mother Jones, October 2006:

Mike Masnick on Techdirt, April 2007:

Saul Hansell on NYTimes.com, November 2008:

&

Edward Cone on CIO Insight, October 2009:

Adam Green on the The Huffington Post, August 2010:

Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld, August 2011:

At first, back when Google was largely uncontroversial, “Don’t be evil” seemed like it was a marketing masterstroke. If Google said it wasn’t evil, people assumed, it wasn’t evil.

Overall, though, I think it’s been an albatross for the company. By being holier-than-thou, it practically demanded that the world hold it to a higher standard. Maybe a standard that it’s impossible for a large public company to maintain. (If it were Yahoo making these privacy changes, nobody would care.)

Now Google can’t ever backpedal on its promise. Whether it’s tweaking its privacy policies in ways that might bolster advertising, or promoting Google+ in Google search results, it’s going to be on the defensive forever.

No, Google isn’t evil. But it is at least as prone to human frailties as any other entity. And thinking that it would be a good idea to declare itself as more moral than other companies is Exhibit A.

Etzioni speaks disparagingly of search results in the form of “ten blue links,” and says “they don’t cut it any more.” “Ten blue links” is a code-word for “Google-style search,” and people–especially people who work for Google rivals–are always disparaging it. Yet nobody’s come up with anything radically different that consumers seem to like a hundredth as much as they like Google’s ten blue link.

I vote for lots of experimentation with new kinds of search myself. (Siri, the iPhone app that Apple bought last year, uses voice recognition and semantic parsing of your input to do something that’s very little like Google, and very cool.) But for now, to riff on a famous Churchill quote, it’s possible that ten blue links are the worst interface for search–except for all the other ones.

Three years ago, when Google’s Chrome browser was brand new, I wrote about the fact that there was no Google Toolbar for it. Then as now, you could have made the case that the toolbar was superflous, but that didn’t stop people from really, really wanting a Google Toolbar for Chrome. The post got a ton of readers, and I followed up with one on my not-very-serious project to build a Google Fakebar.

People like doing things the way they’re comfortable doing them. (That’s the only plausible explanation for why it’s still possible to pay for AOL service.) And Google Toolbar was so useful for so long that here are probably millions of people out there who use it every single day on Firefox.

Shankland says that Google isn’t saying anything about the future of the toolbar for Internet Explorer. I wonder if there are people so wedded to the toolbar that they’d switch from Firefox to IE to keep it?

Are you getting the impression that Microsoft is pretty proud of its tile-based, “keep-it-simple-stupid” Metro user interface, as seen in Windows Phone 7? You should. After moving both its MSDN developer site and the Microsoft Download Center to the much simpler layout, Microsoft is about to give its Bing search engine a makeover.

The tiles across the bottom of the Bing screen will show various blurbs of information including local weather, sports and traffic, as well as current trending searches. The idea follows what we’ve seen from Windows 8: that these tiles are meant to display blurbs of useful information in a visually appealing way. And it’s also well-suited for touch-screen devices.

The changes have not appeared on the public site  yet, although several bloggers as well as tweets from Microsoft employees have verified that some type of change is likely to go live soon. Bing will also gain some other useful features to put it on a more even keel with market-leading Google.

Instant search results will be enabled, as well as features that wil make the process of searching more visual, according to Winrumors. It’s worth it to note that this is all in HTML5 — aiming to make the functionality pretty much platform-agnostic.

I’m curious to find out whether any of you are seeing the new changes, or better yet, what you think of Microsoft’s Metro interface in general. Is Redmond’s new focus on simplicity something you welcome?

Google has a gazillion tests going on at any one time, many of which never turn into permanent, pervasive changes, so it’s a tad early to mourn the loss of I’m Feeling Lucky. And I’m not sure when I last used it–or used it at all, except as an experiment rather than a feature I liked and needed. Still, I’d miss it. I think that’s because it’s a reminder that Google wasn’t always the Web’s dominant company–there was a time when it was an up-and-coming search engine invented by a couple of Stanford students.

Google's Johanna Wright shows off the new Search by Image feature.

“I don’t need ten blue links — just give me the answer!”–Bing Search Blog post, October 2010

“Yahoo Vows Death to the ’10 Blue Links’”–IDG News article, May 2009

It’s funny: Google’s competitors spend a lot of time explaining that “ten blue links”–the traditional search results that we’ve known since the dawn of search engines–are annoying and/or obsolete. But I haven’t noticed any consumer uprising over them, or a mass exodus from search engines that use them. Actually, I suspect that any company that rails against “ten blue links” would cheerfully swap places with Google if it had the chance, dependent on blue links though Google may be.

And at Google’s Inside Search event today, thee was lots of news–but the company didn’t seem to be on a mission to deemphasize traditional results pages. Instead, most of the news was about making the blue links more useful–getting you to them more quickly, in more ways, then letting you get past them and onto a Web page that provides the information (Google would probably say “knowledge” rather than “information” which you’re looking for.

The morning’s announcements included recaps of recent Google search improvements, plus some new ones:

• Instant Pages is a new feature in Chrome which loads the first result in a Google search in the background before you click on it, so it loads almost instantly if you do click on it–even if it’s a page that normally takes several seconds to render. (You can get it in Chrome’s Dev version now, or in the next beta, or in non-beta Chrome this summer.)
• Search by Image lets users of Google.com’s desktop version drag and drop an image into the search field, then get results that relate to it. Google’s demo involved a snapshot of a Greek island which the search engine’s image-recognition technology was able to identify. (It should show up in the next couple of days.)
• Voice Search, a feature of Android and Google’s iPhone app that lets you speak a query rather than typing it, will be available in Chrome as well. (It’ll roll out over the next week.)
• Google Images will get the Google Instant feature which starts displaying results as you type. (This one will arrive over the next couple of months, but you can turn it on in Google Labs now.)
• Google.com’s mobile version has some new features, including icons on the home page for items such as “Restaurants” and “Coffee” that take you directly to blue links coupled with an interactive map, and a query “builder” that lets you construct searches based on Google’s suggestions as you type. (I confess that I don’t completely understand how this second feature works even after seeing it demoed and trying it for myself.)

That’s a lot of new functionality to chew on, not all of which is available quite yet. And some of it will require Chrome, at least for now, although Google says it’s using open standards that would let other browsers implement these features, and that it plans to roll some of the new functionality into Google Toolbar.

Almost none of what the company announced today is about eliminating blue links; at most, it’s about supplementing links with additional useful info, as Google Mobile is now doing with its links-and-map view. In that respect, it strikes me as being both extremely ambitious and rather traditional.

As usual at Google events, the spokespeople on stage said (over and over) that Google is obsessed with speed–and in one way or another, everything they showed off today was about making searching faster. It says that it benchmarks how long searches take down to the millisecond, and that the new improvements can shave several seconds off a search, resulting in happier users and a happier Google.

Of course, it said similar things about Google Instant when it announced it last year. If Google watched me search and timed how long it took, I don’t dispute that Instant might be speeding things up, but I’ve never quite warmed up to it: it still makes me feel a bit as if I’m being smacked in the face with search results (some of which are irrelevant ) before I’m ready to look at them. Speed in other words, is unquestionably essential–but I’m not so sure that it automatically translates into a better experience.

I was still impressed overall by what Google showed off today, and I’m looking forward to trying it and writing about it as it rolls out. More thoughts to come…

I’ll be at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens on Tuesday morning at 9:30am to liveblog Google’s “Inside Search” event. You can come hang out with me and get the news as it develops at technologizer.com/insidesearch, and I hope you do…