Monday
15Dec2008
Gatekeepers
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 01:58AM 
You don't have to be The Wizard of Oz to know that information is power. These days, there is no shortage of people wanting to control access to information. I thought google searches were "objective" and relied on computer algorithms. It appears not:
"Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance."
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Reader Comments (6)
Patty,
"Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance."
It's a hysteric statement written by that register dude, who is generally hysterical. They didn't say that at all. They said that they might use some results from wiki search (which is run by users not staff) to affect the main search. And the same guy who wrote that article already complains about the current PageRank scheme.
In any case, Google results are already far from 'objective', as there are plenty of wingnuts posting links to all sorts of crap, and that pollutes the results already. I wrote about this kind of thing myself earlier today.
Frank: well, I'm open to what you say as my computer expertise is minimal. I do like to know, though, if what is presented as "objective" is in fact subject to editor approval, or someone's conscious value judgment.
Patty,
It's not so much a computer expertise issue. This wiki search they are experimenting is a sort of 'wisdom of crowds' thing. I haven't actually tried it, but it's like people voting for what the search results should be - not some individual editorialising. So they're saying if the crowd vote something off the front page, they might use that information to improve their results.
And when they talk about 'obvious changes', they probably mean things like spam, sites that game the system for ad revenue, and links to sites that have malicious code.
But I don't think the current system is 'objective' in the usual sense anyway. It just favors sites with a lot of incoming links. It doesn't mean those sites are really authoritative or the information is going to be accurate.
For example, google 'global warming consensus' and everything after the first few entries is complete rubbish - although you might agree with it. And you won't find this. And google 'darwinian evolution consensus' and you'll get even worse results.
The problem with the wisdom of crowds thing is that politically active get-a-life types know how to game the system
You can't have a even a rough objectivity to a system that can be tricked so easily on political questions.
Or scientific questions that carry a political freight.
frank doesn't see a problem because the people who run google are a pack of lefty loons
Troll
In your opinion is there any large corporation that isn't run by leftie loons ?