Honestly I never liked the "don't be evil" catchphrase when I was there exactly because evil was never defined, and in fact can't really be defined. Evil is a cartoon word, a meaningless abstraction.

My understanding is that actually, in the very beginning, it had a very specific intention related to the behaviour of Microsoft in the late 90s towards Netscape and how they disbanded the IE team in an attempt to stop the web from developing, something that had alienated a lot of people in the industry and especially in a company whose entire mission revolved around the web. However even by the time I'd arrived the phrase had become unmoored from that and within a few years it was common for people to be describing boring, anodyne business decisions as "evil" if they disagreed with them, like what the background colour of ads should be, or whether to reskin Gmail. I very quickly learned to tune out accusations that something was "evil" at Google because it was always a petty complaint about nothing that could possibly do justice to the word.

I think Larry and Sergey were not comparable to the current leadership. They had strong, unusual opinions and were willing to defend them against criticism. They were willing to prove people wrong or overrule them in order to build the company Google became. When bolshie employees got up at TGIF and went on some epically unprofessional rant about miscellaneous nonsense like what was served for lunch that day, or how the new visual design for product X was evil, they'd just literally take the piss out of that person live in front of the company. And they were right to do so! Live by the sword, die by the sword. They were a million miles from the modern Google that appears to be apologise for its own existence the moment the militant leftist wing of their employee base fires up the outrage machine. L&S would tolerated that, which in hindsight was a mistake, but their decisions weren't affected by it.

There's a certain school of thought these days that tech companies should care more about the consequences of their work. I find that school to often be a cover for the left to demand that tech companies align those consequences more with their liking. When I joined Google it was a very libertarian place, my manager and the guy sent to train us were both hard-core and openly capitalist. The company did not pass judgement on its users or the web that it found, it merely made things easier to find. To the extent it made a moral judgement of humanity it was a positive one: give people information and the world will be a better place. To me that wasn't shallow, it was a philosophy of respect. The modern tech industry has been steadily attacked and overrun by people who have a very different outlook: humans are dumb, can't take care of themselves and we have a moral duty to manipulate them for their own good. That isn't caring about the consequences of their work, it's just a different take on it. And ultimately, one that leaves many people cold.