Google: Threat or Menace?

13 Comments

A couple of fascinating items discussing the growing power (and concomitant lack of accountability) of Google:

  • A Wired article from earlier this year: "Google vs. Evil," by Josh McHugh.
  • Google Watch, a site dedicated to pointing out Google's potential for abuse of power.

Now, Wired is all about overstating the potential future of technology in one direction or another, and Google Watch is almost certainly much more alarmist than it needs to be. I'm willing to keep trusting Google for the time being; I still see them as being among the good guys. But I think the above article and site are good reminders that there's tremendous potential for abuse there.

Also relevant are a couple of articles from The Register by Andrew Orlowski with the premise that blogs are ruining Google results: one article about an anti-war slogan being repurposed by bloggers, and another suggesting (though this never panned out) that Google was likely to remove blogs from its main listings. Orlowski appears to have an axe to grind about this stuff; I have a hard time getting incensed about blogs temporarily obscuring other sources, given that Google rankings change rapidly and frequently. In particular, the thing Orlowski complained about in that first article (that the only uses of the phrase "the second superpower" turned up by Google were references to the altered meaning of the term as used in blogs) is simply no longer true, now that the bloggers have gone on to talk about other things (and about Orlowski's article). (Also, heh, it turns out the original article Orlowski was talking about never actually used the phrase "the second superpower." See above about axe-grinding.)

And I think there's a pretty big math error (or at least misleading statement) in that second Orlowski article. Orlowski says:

Google searches 3,083,324,652 pages as of 4PM PT today. Assuming there are one million bloggers, and generously assuming they have a hundred pages each, that amounts to 0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google.

I can see how it could be a concern if bloggers accounted for 1 in 3000 pages on the web but had search results wildly out of proportion to that. But it seems to me that 100 million out of 3000 million is 1 in 30, or about 3%—about 3 out of 100, which is very different from 3 out of 10,000. ...Or does ".03 per cent" mean "3 out of 100" in British usage? I'm honestly not sure. Regardless, to an American this phrasing is definitely misleading. I wrote to Orlowski to ask him about it, but didn't receive a response.

Anyway. Regardless of precise numbers, it's interesting to see some people being critical of Google, especially in light of the ubergeeks' adoration of it; I haven't seen this kind of criticism of it 'til now.

13 Responses to “Google: Threat or Menace?”

  1. David Moles

    So what constitutes a blog, anyway? I mean, it’s easy to say any site on certain servers (Journalscape, Blogspot) or running certain software (Blogger, MovableType, Bloxsom) is a blog, but what about something like Slashdot or Ars Technica or Crypto-Gram (okay, that last one’s a stretch) that are blog-like, but predate the coining of the term?

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  2. Jed

    Well, I think it’s fine to apply a term to items which existed before the term did. Many people would say that Frankenstein was science fiction, for example. And by the broadest definition of “blog,” all online journals are blogs, even those which have been around for a long time.

    However, I agree that it’s not obvious what constitutes a blog. I’m guessing from context that Orlowski was talking specifically about certain kinds of sites that have strong blog nature in a limited sense of the term—one person or a small group posting regular smallish articles focusing on links to other sites, displayed in reverse-chronological order with several recent entries displayed on one web page. (Slashdot kind of fits that model, except on a much larger scale; interesting that my gut feeling is that Slashdot isn’t a blog while Ars Technica is, but I’m not sure why I feel that way. And MetaFilter is even more of a gray area for me.)

    …But your question makes me think more about what Orlowski was getting at with his statistics, and I’m reminded that he was just making up those numbers anyway. His point was really that a certain rather small set of what I’ve seen others refer to as “A-list bloggers” have a strongly out-of-proportion influence over everyone, because if those bloggers say something, they all link to each other saying it, and Google’s PageRank algorithm makes their pages prominent, and everyone uses Google to search the web (and control over communications is control over reality). So regardless of the “million bloggers” thing (and the “hundred pages per site” thing, which is pretty irrelevant when you’re talking about dynamically created pages backed with databases), I think his general concern (power is being concentrated in the hands of a few) is worth being concerned about, even if his specific worries are overblown.

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  3. Rachel Heslin

    Tangentially, I find it amusing that more people come to my blog looking for Sarah Jessica Parker (whom I mentioned a couple of months ago) than for me.

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  4. David Moles

    Except for a brief period arount the appearance of Polyphony and of “Fetch” on SH, my name’s never been the top search term on my site. Usually it’s phrases like “Bengali whores” turning up one of the papers from my grad school gender & colonialism class — and, I suspect, not providing much satisfaction to the searchers.

    I think my sense of confusion (or perhaps annoyance) over the question of what should or shouldn’t be considered a blog comes from the fact that for quite some time I resisted the term itself on the grounds that it was boxing in something that didn’t need to be boxed in. (Plus, the word itself is ugly as sin.)

    Self-conscious blogging qua blogging has gotten big enough that the term probably means more now than it did when it was originally coined. But I still feel like it somehow diminishes the work of people who’d been keeping chronologically indexed, entry-oriented websites for years before that to pigeonhole them into the blogging “genre”.

    To make an analogy, if you were to call T.H. White’s The Once and Future King epic fantasy, there’s a narrow sense in which you would be accurate, but you’d be encouraging your listeners to draw a lot of incorrect inferences.

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  5. David Moles

    Some better examples of bloglike pre-blog things: Jamie Zawinski’s rants (especially confusing since he now has a separate blog) and the DNA Lounge renovation and operation journal.

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  6. Jenn Reese

    My hubby Kenny, a brand-new Googler, has posted some comments about the Google article in his journal if you’re interested.

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  7. Vardibidian

    I’m going to toss in the quote from Geoffrey Numberg:

    “The outcomes of Google’s popularity contests can be useful to know, but it’s a mistake to believe they reflect the consensus of the ‘Internet community,’ whatever that might be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy — the picture that’s implicit in all the talk of the Internet as a ‘digital commons’ or ‘collective mind.’ (“Search Engine Society; As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation” 18 May, 2003 New York Times Section 4, Page 4)

    Keeping that in mind, it’s hard to get as worked up as Mr. Orlowski appears to be. Do people really find bloggers through Google searches? I can’t think of any I read at all regularly that I found through a Google search; in fact, it’s pretty much just friends, friends of friends, and once in a long long while I will read Andrew Sullivan or one of the other A-list bloggers.

    Alternately, I hope by now that anyone seeking actual information who finds a blog will bring their own salt. And the Classic Blog, where everything is a link to something else, does provide instant footnoting; if I think you misread the McHugh article, well, only terminal laziness prevents me from making my own opinion. It’s one click.

    Thank you,
    -Vardibidian.

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  8. Jed

    Although I don’t agree with him, I wanted to clarify what I think Orlowski is complaining about: I think he’s saying that if you do a Google search about something that the Bloggers Who Matter (BWM) (ie, those who are popular enough to be weighted heavily in Google PageRank) have gotten worked up about, you can’t easily find any information other than what the BWM said about it. And if all of the BWM agree (as I assume Orlowski feels they tend to do), then your Google search results in, effectively, dozens of copies of the same opinion, and nothing else.

    In response to Numberg, I imagine that many of the technorati (whose opinions I could find by Googling, but I’d rather speculate) would say that of course Google doesn’t reflect The Opinion Of The Web; it reflects the opinions of the most trusted people on a given topic. Of course, the technorati tend to believe that this is the ultimate form of interactive democracy—where everyone votes for the best information rather than the “most popular.”

    That phrase “popularity contest” is mighty intriguing, though. Geeks tend to be skeptical of anything that’s popular, and yet they love Google. Is that just because the concept of whuffie appeals so much to geeks? (That question is a little backwards, of course, since I would be shocked if Cory didn’t base the concept of whuffie partly on PageRank; Cory is a big Google fan.) A different sort of popularity contest, one that relies on having the respect of your peers, a meritocracy in which things like looks are irrelevant? What’ll happen to geek respect for Google if/when the unwashed masses start being more influential online, and Britney Spears fan pages start dominating Google search results?

    I have no thesis in this comment, just assorted inchoate thoughts. But I’m intrigued. Perhaps more later.

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  9. David Moles

    I like Google because it does a better job than any previous search engine of actually finding me the page I’m looking for. How it does that is secondary.

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  10. Vardibidian

    Well, what Numberg is on about (sorry, the article is old enough to be off the free-but-register part of the Times site) was mostly the concern that, if you look up Topic X, and the BWM aren’t on about Topic X at that moment, you instead get the Bloggers Who Are Complete Nutballs about Topic X and Never Shut Up about It (BWACNaTXaNSUaI), who are, shall we say, not quite as trustworthy as the BWM. And they all link to each other, for corroboration of their theory about Michael Moore and the Rotarians secretly funding the Nuclear Powered Helicopters to control the Congolese Diamond Trade. So if you search for, say, Rotarians + congo + diamonds, you’ll get nothing but the BWACNaRaNSUaI, who have all blogged about Rotarians today just like they do every day, and worse then not learning anything about it, you’ll learn things that are false and crazy.

    I actually don’t think that happens much.

    Redintegro Iraq,
    -V.

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  11. David Moles

    I don’t think it happens much either, but possibly poor Numberg just happens to have exactly the wrong sort of interests.

    It is interesting sometimes to see what my own blog turns out to be a highly-ranked link for. I like to think, though, that most of the entries would allow people to get to a “primary” source in a click or two.

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  12. Kenny Smith

    Hi all,

    For those of you who don’t know me, I work for Google so I know how things work on the inside (and I’m obviously biased, so take that into account too). I’m trying not to be preachy here, so if I come off that way just chalk it up to me not being a good writer. 🙂

    I just wanted to drop some info here about PageRank (it’s public info so I’m safe sharing it).

    The whole concept that a group of people who keep blogs/journals can get together and link to one another get better PageRank.. is utterly false. There are highly intelligent systems in the PageRank calculation that detect and DEVALUE what are called “link farms.” People have tried to work the Google system from the first moment they even had an inkling of how it worked, but the ubergeeks making the system are either one step of ahead of the gamers or react so fast to new tactics that it doesn’t matter. It’s not based on how many people link to you, it’s based on how many people link to you and how important those pages are. A link to you from Yahoo.com is worth WAY more than a link to you from http://www.no-one-knows-who-i-am.com.

    In my opinion, the whole complaint getting a bunch of blog results when I search for topic A is rubbish. If you get a bunch of blog results about topic A before you get the actual source of topic A, then people on the net find those blogs more pertinant than the actual source. Google doesn’t fiddle those numbers, there is a mathmatical formula and everyone gets put through it (including Google.com without special bias). In addition to that, most if not all blogs provide links to the original source they are writing about. So, if you click on the top link at Google and it’s a blog, then read for just a second and you’ll find a link to the original source.

    This is turning out to be a lot longer than I originally planned… sorry about that. 🙂 I’ll leave you with one more thing, I read somewhere recently that Google was known to be working on removing blog results from the main search to avoid this kind of problem. This is absolutely not true, I’m not sure where the rumor started, but Google does not edit the list of pages unless forcibly requried to by law (and even then they try to provide information about what they were forced to edit).

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  13. Jed

    Thanks, Kenny. But just to be clear about what Orlowski was complaining about, I don’t think even he was saying that the bloggers are intentionally gaming Google. His point was that because of the popularity of blogs and the way they tend to work (with a lot of popular blogs all linking to the same thing sometimes), the PageRank algorithms will often (without any intentional manipulation) put blog results ahead of other stuff. Since he felt that blog results were obscuring other results, he felt that was a bad thing. And note that in the case he was talking about, the bloggers weren’t discussing the original source; they were discussing the alternate version of the term in question, and the complaint was that this obscured the original source. (Like, I put up a page saying “In my language, ‘thizwop’ means ‘peace.'” The next day, an A-list blogger happens to put up a page saying “Hey, I have a cool idea: why don’t we use the word ‘thizwop’ to mean ‘particle-beam weapon’?” All the other A-list bloggers think that’s a cool idea, so they all link to it, and none of them even know about my original suggestion so they don’t link to that. They’re all highly respected, so their links count for a lot of whuffie/PageRank. The result, again without anyone intending it, is that my original suggestion is (temporarily) obscured in the search results.)

    As it turned out, in the specific case Orlowski was complaining about, he was wrong about what the original source said; and the nature of blogs ensured that shortly after his article went up, it became easy to find lots of discussion of the whole issue. So I’m certainly not defending his complaint. But I don’t think that he was complaining about quite the same thing you’re talking about.

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