Ghost of a flea: Google watch

? Politics in wartime | Main | Eurofighter ?

May 31, 2004

Google watch

Thoughts on Google's market dominance and issues of privacy are worth a look. I admit this is the first time I had given thought to copyright in relation to everything sitting in the Google cache. I am not sure how material can be searchable and uncopyable. I run "noarchive" tags at my other .com for pages that include assignment and examination materials if only as a minor speedbump for overly clever students in future sections of a course.

The article loses me with the following:

Call it class warfare, if you like. Because that brings up the other major gripe that Google Watch has with Google. That's the PageRank problem -- the fact that Google's primary ranking algorithm has less to do with the quality of web pages, than it has to do with the "power popularity" of web pages. Their approach to ranking is anti-democratic, in that already-powerful pages are mathematically granted extra power to anoint other pages as powerful.

This is all too typical lefty Frankfurt School-style elitism. Look, you may think a website is of higher "quality" than another and feel free to make a monastic crawl of your own for "quality" search results. But if popularity decides the rank of a given page this is an absolutely democratic result no matter what you think of the opinion of the masses. Are there network effects at work? Sure. Look at the blogosphere. We are all scrambling for attention in the shadow of the InstaMan. I will take my chances on the quality and popularity of my own content - however dubious - and pin my hopes on guerilla marketing tactics by preference to what some UN civil servant thinks I should be reading.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 31, 2004 07:35 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ghostofaflea.com/cgi-bin/mt/trackback-engine.cgi/353

Comments

Snort. Yeah, it's "undemocratic" that popular folks -- or their popular representatives -- get to "set" the GoogleRank. It should be judged by "quality," as established by an elite (but self-efacing) panel of litcrit academics and page design wonks who can direct us to what Real Web Literature is.

That would certainly be enough to drive *me* from the Internet.

Posted by: *** Dave at June 1, 2004 11:50 AM