Guardian journalist complains about someone making money. Who would have thought?
FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian). UK print media has ~10 national newspapers, which are politically segmented (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..
This and its parent are ad hominem attacks (DH1 -- see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) -- it may be in the writer's interest to complain about the Internet, but that does not mean that the writer's points are incorrect.
"..ad hominem attacks", are you kidding? They are questioning the writer's objectivity, as do it. The writer's points/ conclusions are incorrect. The solution is not to constrain or eliminate Google, it's for the Guardian and the other content providers to adapt to be relevant.
Questioning the writer's objectivity rather than rebutting their points is an ad hominem attack. I'm not kidding. If you think the writer's points and conclusions are incorrect (I do) you should write a rebuttal, rather than pointing out that the writer isn't disinterested. Interested parties can still make valid arguments!
Sure, people sometimes misuse the term ad hominem, but not in this case. The comment said that:
"Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum"
I fail to see how being liberal implies the bizarre views in the article. Bringing up the political leaning of the Guardian was a bit of a cheap shot and not at all germane to the topic.
"A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to the speaker's point."
As I interpret your sentence, that is not what the article you are quoting says, and it is also not correct. This is irrelevant here, however, because the character trait being discussed is not related to the speaker's point; it is merely an argumentum ad hominem.
Why on earth are you linking to encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com instead of wikipedia.com? By doing so you give people following your link staler content, a bunch of ads, worse formatting, and no ability to fix errors they find.
(For those who don't know: e.t.c is one of many sites that just scrape the entirety of Wikipedia -- er, I think they omit some bits, mostly in the hope of making the true origin of the material less obvious -- and re-present its content as if it's theirs, adding a bunch of paid advertisements, with just a bit of teeny-tiny small print crediting Wikipedia. This doesn't seem to me like behaviour we should be encouraging.
Valid question and valid points. To answer it: I linked to that because it's what I use, and I use that service because for me the benefit of aggregating many references into one outweighs the downsides (which you highlight). I'm not promoting it, so I would like to think that my linking to it can fall into the category of 'diversity of opinion is beneficial to the community'.
FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian). UK print media has ~10 national newspapers, which are politically segmented (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..