I wonder how much it is to Google’s (and similar companies’) benefit to “turn evil?”
I’m guessing this is more a sociological fact than a business fact. That most public companies do it proves nothing. Effectiveness is often not strongly tied to real world actions in a huge number of areas. Actual actions are more attuned to “what everyone knows” rather than what is true. Those who believe themselves more intelligent than most are more prone to these cognitive limitations, not less.
Issues like this is why I think that capitalism is most likely to destroy everything than to reform.
Au contraire. To go public is to put your company on the auction block. How many days between when Ben & Jerry’s went public and when they became a subsidiary of Unilever? In the principal-agent model, the most egregious sin is to leave money on the table. The implications of this for a search engine are left to the reader as an exercise.