AZspot

Tuesday 2 June 2009

Cory Doctorow: Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google ☀

Melvin Dewey didn’t predict computers; he also mixed Islam in with Sufism, and gave table-knocking psychics their own category. A full-contact sport like the internet just doesn’t lend itself to a priori categorisation.

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world’s knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

But this is not without risk: search engines accumulate near-complete indexes of our interests, our loves, our hopes and aspirations. Our relationship with them is as intimate as our relationships with our lovers, our confessors, our therapists.

What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It’s ideological mindshare. It’s relevance.

Contrariwise: being poorly ranked by a search engine makes you irrelevant, broke and invisible.

What’s more, search engines routinely disappear websites for violating unpublished, invisible rules. Many of these sites are spammers, link-farmers, malware sneezers and other gamers of the system. That’s not surprising: every complex ecosystem has its parasites, and the Internet is as complex as they come. The stakes for search-engine placement are so high that it’s inevitable that some people will try anything to get the right placement for their products, services, ideas and agendas. Hence the search engine’s prerogative of enforcing the death penalty on sites that undermine the quality of search.

It’s a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It’s too much power for a handful of companies to wield.

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