Google missed a couple of cents in analysts' estimates and their stock dropped as much as 15% in some markets, a loss of over $10+ billions for the internet company. Over $10 billion of dollars just disappeared from Google's valuation. Google boggles the mind. Some people might ask, is this another dot com double bursting? No way. It has been reported that Google did not make analysts' expectations because they were busy giving money away to charitable organizations. It seems that the company that promised to "Do No Evil" wants to do some good to balance the evil censorship demanded on them by the communist regime in China.
On Google's site, you can find 'Ten things Google has found to be true.' Item four in the aforementioned document states, "Democracy on the web works." Google should change this to "Democracy, but definitely not free speech, on the web works as defined by our algorithms." Item six of the same company philosophy document states that "You can make money without doing evil." Google should change this to "You can make billions without doing evil. Supporting evil is not the same thing as doing evil, right?" In reading Google's corporate literature and philosophical musings, it seem that when they talk about 'evil' they are talking about pop-up ads and not about political prisoners.
There are a lot of conspiracy theorists that think that Google is evil. Personally I don't think that Google is particularly evil, but that doesn't mean that Google can't be used for evil. The information Google stores in their databases is very 'precious' as Smeagol from Lord of the Ring would say. The key thing is knowing what information Google retains from your online habits. If you ever visited a Google website, your computer has been marked with a unique id stored in a cookie that doesn't expire until 2038. This means that Google can always associate what you search for to your specific computer. And with GMail and Google's Toolbar more and more information is being collected from your online habits.
Personally I don't recommend the Google Toolbar, I could do without knowing the page rank of every single page I visit. I do recommend that you remove your stored cookies every once in a while. Cookies are just small text files stored in your hard drive used by web sites to remember your last visit. In Firefox, you can clear your cookies by going to Tools > Options and then clicking on the Privacy tab, followed by the Cookies tab at which point you can click the 'Clear Cookies Now' button. Firefox also allows you to view the contents of cookies installed in your machine by clicking 'View Cookies' in the Cookies tab. Looking through the Google cookies I have in my computer I see that I have some that expire until 2038 while others expire in 2016. Can you image the wealth of information Google can gain from your browsing in the course of over 10 years?