Google Wack

I was interested in reading Kottke’s recent piece on Google and AdSense, which lays out the stupidity of marketers in relation to their tech-savvy clients. For a long time, I’ve thought that Google was wolf in sheep’s clothing, though I use it all the time for all my searches and have done so since it was born.
More recently, the NYT wrote an article in its business section about Google’s placement of counters on select “customers” Google home pages so that they can keep track of how many or what searches take place on a more minute level. Why is the curse of dishonesty so strong for large companies?