Subject: In Defence of Google

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 21:33:59 +0300 (IDT)

As I speak, search engines on the web are struggling to be No. 2. But one
must understand that searching the web for information is by definition a
heuristic, since it is supposed to find what people expect it to find for
them. Google is also a heuristic. An apparently good one, but still such.
And every heuristic has its anomalies.

I consider Google-wacking to be a very bad habit. There was a time when
searching for "more evil" yielded the homepage of Microsoft as the first
hit. Or that "DeCSS" yielded the homepage of a (useless, in everybody's
opinion) perl script that strips CSS styles off an HTML file, while not
applying them in the process.

When you search for Google for a simple term you expect to get what you
are looking for in the first hits. How would you feel if searching for
Judaism would yield a balantly antisemitic, highly irrational, site? Or as
Chen was kind enough to observe, "Women" would point to some pornography
sites? Or "KDE" pointing to http://www.gnome.org/ ? ;-)

It is possible that Google will be mislead either intentionally or
unintentionally. And naturally, the Google indexer contains a lot of rules
and tweaks to avoid such phenomena. Someone can obviously complain that
some simple query does not yield his homepage which propogates it anywhere
near the start, (even though it includes many hyperlinks) and naturally
the Google maintainers have to process this complaint and see what they
can do about it in the limited time they have to tweak their rules.
There's nothing unnatural or immoral about it, as Google would also want
to give you a better surfing quality now, besides trying to formulate
"better" heuristics that can do that 1 year from now.[1]

The Church of Scientology's DMCA threat could be thought of as a simple
complaint. For the record searching Google for "anti scientology" yields
the very site that was removed from the "scientology" search. But
otherwise promoting this site artificially to make people more aware of
the evils of the CoS is not a constructive solution. People should stop
google-whacking, (or become paranoid) and otherwise criticize it with
facts and evidence.

I'll give you an example: my mother believes I should study Tai-Chi so I
can become calmer. I read somewhere that Tai-Chi, actually makes the
subconscious mind more dominant, which can eventually yield a lot of
unwanted side-effects. Kind of like hypnosis or meditation. I tried
looking for "anti tai-chi" on google (purposely) and received absolutely
nothing of significance. Obviously, more people criticize Scientology than
those who criticize Tai-Chi. Probably, for a good reason.

Similarly, searching for "DMCA" on google almost entirely yields site of
people who are against the Digital Millenium Copyrights Act. Do you think
that the U.S. government can claim that this search defames this perfectly
good and valid law? Obviously not.

I noted the Freshmeat Effect sometimes earlier. What is apparent is that
computer-related matters seem to be propogated better than other matters.
Part of the reason is that hackers who like computers are also better at
propagating information on the Internet and making use of the WWW and how
Google handles it.

So my suggestion is to give the Google people a break. They have enough on
their mind than trying to make sure a Googly-whacked link stays afloat. If
you don't like that fact, try to code something like Erwin of
User-Friendly who obviously will be much better at finding things than
Google can. Good luck.[2]

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[1] - Naturally, they should also try to improve their methodology, or
else they would stand still.

[2] - Erwin was supposedly written in COBOL, but I allow you to use any
language of your choice.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"