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July 18, 2003

The Trouble of Google

Steven Johnson has been digging for Googleholes. As many has complained, Google search turn out to unrelevant information, such as searching “apple” would get you the Apple company. Or cases as Steven pointed out, the search result seem commercial oriented, that put a search on flowers, the top 5 would be some flowers stores…

Steven got a point on these issues:

You can’t really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the “group mind,” but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn’t speak for everybody.

That’s very true. You can’t expect Google would be your encyclopaedia* or *dictionary. It’s aggregration of, web, after all. The PageRank works and it’s Google’s nature to follow the rules, instead of comment on people’s hyperlink. If you depend on Google to do research, bear in mind of the side-effect.

Mind you, it’s about the web, not the reality, not always the truth.

July 18, 2003 01:35 AM | General
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Bloggers' role in this is interesting, though, isn't it:

we can by the power of our frequent linking shift google results to more proper results for "flowers" if we want... Someone show me some good botanical encyclopaedias, and I'll happily link to them! :-)

Blogging - bringing flower power to the people ;-) .... or something like that :-)

08:52 AM on July 18, 2003 · comment by Anders · #

That's the blogging power -- the frequent updating and lots of links just tuning Google search result here and there. Could it be a positive strength if we wish? When blogging community is big enough to hit almost everything on Google, would the PageRank algorithm changed? :-)

04:00 PM on July 18, 2003 · comment by yowkee · #

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