I had occasion to do a lot of research for a business degree after having been out of school for 15 years and in the process I arrived at some interesting realizations about search engines and information.

I found that the sources I was using were very different than those I would have used 15 years ago. Before I would have searched for information by the context in which it was originally published. I would have gathered books, papers, studies etc relevant to my topic, and extracted the information I needed from them. Using search engines I wound up with a lot of documents on topics completely unrelated to the subject I was researching and I would use only small parts of those documents.

I realized that search engines like Google, and to a certain extent others like ProQuest, and Lexis-Nexis are completely changing the way information is organized and consumed. They take information out of the context intended by the authors and create an entirely new ad-hock context based upon the engine’s indexing algorithm and the search criteria specified. In essence, every search result is an entirely new machine-generated document composed fragments of many unrelated documents in which the context of the source documents was irrelevant.

I suspect that there was a really interesting and useful research project in that somewhere.

They could become the “Rupert Murdoch” in the atmosphere of the Search Engines. Yahoo and the rest unfortunately are way..way………..behind.
http://www.vernasmith.blogspot.com

Google offers massive convenience. That’s why they’re winning. I’d like to see a public-service search engine, and public-service “store your data on the Internet and access it with handy web services” system, but I have no idea how they could be built. The public sector has almost no IT competence or understanding. A university might be able to do it, but I have no idea how they would fund it.

Wikipedia sucks

But, you see, Linux doesn’t suck. :-) And while Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW does suck, but at least he can have some excuses for that. :-) :-) (E.g. it doesn’t suck in ways in which he has control over.)

And Wikipedia does sucks, and Jimbo is actively contributing to the suckage—by promoting Essjay to Arbitrator, for example.

But it was very definitely burying information, as the letter clearly indicates. We know this for a fact.

That in itself is quite worrying already.

So, is anything wrong with taking advantage of a loss-leader?

I have a Gmail account, and use some of the other Google services, but that doesn’t amount to participation in a Google universe.

It’s certainly possible that Google is burying things in the U.S.—and, as we know from their deal with China—could do more. That’s a big danger… but right now I think it’s a future danger. But that’s all… I think: don’t know.

I know that the ubiquity of free content and the changing ad models are killing a lot of newspapers (though again, Craigslist is as big a “villain”). But even there: do we really need thousands of newspapers in this country? Or twelve really amazing ones? I’d like to say the former, if only because you need a very large pool of journalists—a culture of journalism—to sustain excellent newspapers. OTOH, booksellers are doing pretty well, all things considered, so there’s still something, as I said above, to “the artifact” & that may extend to newspapers.

To Siva’s point: I think Google was a beneficiary of other developments—and is only one driver among many in these changes… changes that are, truly, mind-bending & frustrating. But they’re here—and will be here even if Google stumbles & is replaced by someone else.

Maybe this counts?