Tag: Google

Same Old Dave on Google

If Dave Winer didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. Dave’s company, Userland, makes products so good at doing search that Winer uses Google for searching his own blog. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop Winer from not only criticizing Google for failing to implement non-trivial features, but goes on to suggest that Google is intentionally trying to destroy blogs (emphasis added),

It’s very true that Google has failed to keep up with the “search engine optimization” tricks that cause links to porn sites to show up on our Referers pages and blog post comments. As we’ve said here several times, and thought many more, Google is the place where this practice should be stopped. It’s because of Google that our sites are littered with links to these offensive sites that have nothing to do with ours. If they’re smart enough to come up with tricks like Google News and Local Google, why can’t their search engine recognize comment and referer spam and not use it in determining page rank? Of course they can. Why don’t they? I’d love to hear an explanation. Better yet, I’d love to see them fix it. It’s a bug in Google’s software.

Maybe secretly Google really doesn’t like blogs. Maybe it’s not so secret. They still haven’t deigned to support the standard format for syndication, as every other tech company and major publisher has. Why Google has a stake in breaking the standard is another puzzle. How does this relate to Don’t Be Evil. We’ve asked this question a few times, only to be met with the usual Google stone wall.

When Google News first came out, Dave derided it as defective. Now it’s so good, its evidence that Google really doesn’t want to stop search engine optimization tactics.

I could go on about how Google usually get slammed by people, including Winer, when it tweaks its algorithms to try to deal with those trying to game the system, but the site of Dave complaining about a vendor being slow to fix a bug is simply too much to get past.

Insanity of the Day: Googol vs. Google

This is so absurd that I still half think it must be a hoax. The Baltimore Sun has an interview with relatives of mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner was a mathemtician who popularized the use of the term googol to refer to 10^100, and Google clearly played on the term in naming their company and search engine.

And now Kasner’s descendants want a piece of the Google action. Kanser’s great-neice Peri Fleischer whines to the Sun,

They are playing off that number and not compensating us even a little bit. Ethically, they could have been more giving. If nothing else, they should have given us the opportunity to operate as insiders for the IPO.

. . .

But you believe Google has an obligation to compensate you and your family for using the name coined by your great uncle, correct?

Legally, that’s an open question we’re exploring. But ethically, courteously, yes. I see some hypocrisy there. They have ignored us. Other than changing a couple of letters on the name, they are capitalizing on it. This is a business. These guys are going to make billions of dollars. It’s not a cute little thing.

I’m simply speechless.

Source:

Have your Google people talk to my ‘googol’ people. Gerald P. Merrell, Baltimore Sun, May 16, 2004.

Yahoo! to Compete with Google by Neutering Its Search Engine for Fun and Profit

The reason that Google dominates today as the search engine of choice is that, so far, Google has managed to avoid making the sort of bone-headed decisions that competitors like Yahoo! have. According to the New York Times, for example, Yahoo! has decided to go with a pay-for-listing scheme for its new search service that is supposed to compete with Google. Now this may be great for Yahoo!’s bottom line — temporarily at least — and it may be good for some sites that want to be listed, but as an end-user I just want to find what I’m searching for. But according to the New York Times (emphasis added),

Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

. . .

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Google currently appears to update a large number of its sites every few days — I know that when I post something at AnimalRights.Net, it usually appears in Google’s index about 72 hours later. Yahoo!, however, will only keep sites that current if they pay up front for the service. So, for a mind boggling large number of sites, Google is always going to have more recent information in its index than Yahoo!

Would somebody at Yahoo! explain to me again why I would want to use their intentionally neutered search engine?

Source:

Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index. Saul Hansell, The New York Times, March 2, 2004.

Well, There Might be a Total Asshole Company In Here Somewhere

Correction

Seth Dillingham points out that I didn’t do my homework here. Google might be starting out with the Open Directory database, but they are then modifying it apparently using Page Rank.

The bizarre thing is they’ve apparently truncated the listings — the Open Directory database has many more weblog tools listed than does the Google version (unless Google’s version is old and not being updated, which seems unlikely).

In that case, it is indeed odd that Radio Userland doesn’t show up there is odd. It may not be the best or most widely used tool, but it certainly has a significant base, and leaving it out is odd.

This certainly validates part of Winer’s point — that Google’s got a stupid way of producing its directory. It looks like they’re using Page Rank to create a half-human/half-machine created directory which is actually less useful than if they’d just reproduced as-is the Open Directory data.

– Brian

Dave Winer has this (unintentionally) amusing slam at Google over the lack of inclusion of his blogging tools in their directory of blogging tools,

Google’s directory of weblog tools. None of the tools I wrote made the list. Centralized directories on the Web are like buggy whips for cars. Let’s fix this bug.
Google, this makes you look like a total asshole company. Your tool is
listed first, and your competitor’s tools aren’t listed at all. When
will it become too embarassing to support this antiquated mode

But, of course, this is not Google’s directory — they have no responsibility at all over what gets listed here. They’re simply rebranding the Open Directory project whose directory is available to anyone. I guess the Open Directory folks are probably in some sort of conspiracy with Google or something like that.

As far as Open Directory, it’s not a bad directory but runs smack into the main problem that creating a general directory of the Internet is pretty much an unmanageable task at this point. Dave’s got his own proposed solution which doesn’t do anything that I can see to obviate the obvious problems with creating a directory of a network that has millions of sites and billions of pages.

I’m surprised that anybody uses these general directories like Yahoo! or Open Directory anymore. It’s a little like encountering an old card catalog for a library with a sign reading, “Warning: this catalog only indexes 5% of the actual known books in the library.” Would you actually bother to use such a tool? Then why bother with Yahoo! or Open Directory?

Is Distribution of Stories in Google News Indicative of Anything?

Meril Yourish is unhappy that a peculiar search she did of stories at GoogleNews didn’t turn up more stories about the Palestinian terrorist cowards who shot a woman and her three kids outside of Jersualem yesterday. Yourish seems to think that this is evidence of bias.

A better explanation is that it’s a function of the way that GoogleNews seems to group stories (and remember, this is still in beta) as well as the search she’s doing.

The search string she is using is looking for news articles similar to some article from The Statesman that used to be in the GoogleNews index (when I follow her link now, it says that story is no longer in the index).

If you do a GoogleNews search on Israel, a story mentioning the terrorist act comes up #6 in the results listing.

The “find more news articles like this” that Yourish is using is likely to produce the weirdest results since Google’s using some sort of heuristic method to automatically link related news stories together. Sometimes it does this pretty good, but since these news stories rarely (if ever) link to each other, a lot of times you get some really odd results. This is also why sometimes on the front page of the GoogleNews site you’ll see some story and next to it a picture that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. A few days ago I was looking at their sports section and they had a series of related stories about basketball accompanied by a picture of a tennis player. Go figure.

It would be an interesting exercise to use Lexis-Nexis to look for difference in coverage of the killing of Palestinians vs. the killing of Israelis in mainstream media coverage. But GoogleNews is far too idiosyncratic and sometimes downright weird to make the sort of claims that Yourish is about it.

Which is not to say that I don’t absolutely adore GoogleNews. As I’ve said before, if I want recent information fast, I usually hit GoogleNew first and only hit Lexis-Nexis if I don’t turn up anything there (and I get Lexis-Nexis access free so cost is no issue).

Conspiracy Theories About Google

Dave Winer is apparently impressed by Daniel Brandt’s anti-Google rantings. But as this Salon.Com article documents, Brandt is a nutty conspiracy theorist (just go a few links deep at his NameBase.Org who is pissed off because *his* page about Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole host of other people, doesn’t show up very high in Google searches.

I particularly love the brief explanation Brandt offers of why Google’s PageRank sucks,

It’s democratic in the same way that capitalism is democratic. You could have the cure for cancer on the Web and not find it in Google because ‘important’ sites don’t link to it.

But, of course, if there were a cure for cancer posted on the web, then it is likely that lots of people would link to it, much like many scientists would end up citing a paper that outlined a successful cure for cancer.

What Brandt wants is for Google to be democratic in the same way that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic.

In fact, as Salon notes, Brandt believes that if you search on “Donald Rumsfeld” his page about Rumsfeld should be shown before Rumsfeld’s DoD biography page, even though it is largely useless and almost impossible to navigate (the main problem with NameBase is that it is an index of citations largely of the conspiracy literature which Brandt has personally read).

Update: A good example of one of Brandt’s nutty conspiracy theories his his speculation about China’s blocking of Google in which Brandt argues that “China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security” because Google may be sharing data about Chinese users with the National Security Agency which would, in Brandt’s mind, “put the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.”