Wordorigins.org

[Updated on 20 December, see note at end.]

Famously, Google has an informal motto of “don’t be evil.” It is a dig at the business practices of Microsoft and an admonition to its employees to use Google’s wealth and market position only in the service of goodness and light. It’s a fun motto, but it’s not quite right; mainly because Microsoft is not really evil. The problem with Microsoft is that they are mediocre; the company produces products that are merely adequate and by force of its wealth and market position squashes technically superior and more innovative products. And if Microsoft can’t beat them, they buy them. Sometimes this quashing of the competition is deliberate, and sometimes it is just inevitable—the giant is so big it can’t help but tread on anyone in its way.

But by focusing on the “evil,” Google has missed the real trap and it is in serious danger of becoming another purveyor of mediocre products, and like the company they are trying not to emulate, a mediocre company so large that it crushes it competitors simply by announcing it is moving into a particular market. The problems with Google Books are legion and well documented. Gmail is the preferred home of automated comment-spammers who are destroying the blogosphere. (Some 80% of the spambots who hit Wordorigins.org each day use Gmail accounts. The problem is so bad that I’ve seriously considered banning Gmail accounts from the site and have only refrained because so many legitimate participants use the service.) These aren’t bad products—they have many good attributes to recommend them—but they have myriad problems and Google seems to be doing little to correct the deficiencies. Mediocrity. And now Google has moved into the dictionary market.

But the new Google Dictionary is not merely mediocre, it is bad. It is laughably bad—Plan Nine from Outer Space bad (only not as funny). If it were from any company other than Google, I’d dismiss it out of hand. But it is Google and if they ever decide to promote it—which fortunately they aren’t doing at the moment; they seem to be doing their level best to hide the fact that it even exists—it has the potential to destroy any number of really good free, online dictionaries that already exist.