Google

I love Google. I remember the first time I discovered it, when my college advisor showed it to me. It's simple, it's easy to use, and it's got approximately a crapload of various offshoots you can use (including blogger). Gmail is amazing, and Google maps is far and away better than any other map service I've found online.

You may have noticed that there's not many ads on Google. In fact, the only ads that they have are small text-based ones that are deemed most relevant to your search by the system. They're unobtrusive, I've found, and don't slow down the system like the big picture ads they have at other sites.

But now some conservatives have got their Irish up over some of Google's ads. If you search for "Tom DeLay" on Google and look at the ads that come up, the top one is a positive ad, and the rest are negative. They sell bumper stickers, or claim to "expose the truth," stuff like that. Sensational, but also pretty germane to what's been a big news story in recent weeks.

So what's the complaint? Well, a conservative outfit evidently took one of the advertisements, changed the name Tom DeLay to Nancy Pelosi, and submitted it to Google to place. Google refused. This is, in the minds of those who conducted the little experiment, proof positive that Google is run by partisan hacks who are out to destroy the Republican party.

Here's a little information about Google. They've got over 3,000 employees currently, and they're probably getting constantly bombarded with advertisements. I'd guess that there's more than just one dude in charge of accepting and rejecting advertisements for Google. I'm a little bit skeptical of using some vague advertising information to extrapolate Google's corporate political bent.

Fargus...