Well, except for one thing. The thing that made Google a game-changer, back in the day, was that it ambitiously sought to scan ALL PAGE CONTENTS and LINKS.
Previous to Google turning our world into BG and AG (Before Google, and After Google), no search engine wanted all that wasted info in its databases, no search engine had a secret agenda to be a giant Hoover for all data, all books, all maps, all everything, the Book of Life, a Tower of Babel Akashic that would make a neo-Platonist blush! I still believe Google is the ultimate Trojan Horse, ostensibly all about search, but not really. I think highly efficient and godlike search is only a tangential side business to Google's REAL business, to create Borges' Most Perfect Map of Everything, to be the most gigantic of giant data Hoovers and suck up everything (with one big eyeball on the day when AI is actually possible, since I don't think real AI can exist, without Google-levels of data behind it). BG, search engines had much lower expectations, and we were all learning to focus focus focus on our meta-data, our H1s, our page titles. Woo woo. It was do or die time back then. There's no way our concept of a Google Bomb, of linking President Bush and miserable failure, could have ever happened without the giant whole-page Hoover. Old search engines only wanted to index the stuff they wanted to index. They wanted us to Set Priorities. And Hierarchies. They wanted us to screw non-linearity. So here we are, in the land of AG, a landscape created and shaped by desires, and the desires of one large entity to suck up data shaped in a certain way led us to consistently shape our data in a certain way. What would happen to the Web if some mysterious virus erased Google's databases tomorrow, the server farms and databanks, and all their back ups? Would the Akashic continue to exist without the ethers for it to live on? Would Confucious still say "It is written.." ? What's so interesting to me is that our current generation of SEO is morphing back into the more focused attention to metadata, both for the hope of the Semantic Web, but also because the Google Hoover may be faltering, may be less godlike than it was when there was less data to suck up. Perhaps Google's vacuum bags are getting full, and the "sandbox" and the Long Tail are becoming less indexable then they once were, and maybe even Google is secretly throwing out some of those old vacuum bags, without telling us. I mean, sorry Chris Anderson, but the Long Tail could not exist without a Google as a prerequisite. Marshall McLuhan would be the first to tell you that (I'm certain Anderson knows that as well). So the SEO folks are hedging their bets, building new webs that look a lot like the old meta-tag webs of the 1990s, before Google started scanning whole pages, whole books, whole everything. The PR line is that Google is the master index of all indexes, but quietly, in the deep dark margins, maybe some data is falling off the edge of the Known World, maybe some data is falling into the Bottomless Pit, with the requisite weeping and gnashing of teeth. Maybe the Google search results are losing some of their (sshhhhh) authority and precision, the very thing that made something free and wonderful rise up to bury the Lexis-Nexis's of the world in irrelevancy. I don't think it is all about landing on the first page or the first screen of the results. I mean, yes, that's a big deal. But truly, I'm more interested in what ISN'T coming up in the deep results anymore, without so much of a press release announcing that the Hoover may have reached some of its limits, may be deliberately not crawling certain sectors of the Net, may be a less authoritative source for the Data of Everything. Chris <---still waiting for something bigger than the neo-Platonic imitation of the Akashic Records On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 1:21 PM, Dennis Deacon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Will, I would agree that Google is not perfect. However, in this case, > the blame cannot be solely on Google. Wikipedia's use of placeholder > pages to encourage contribution within its community is highlighting > a "bad data in, bad data out" issue. > > Based on Google's PageRank algorithm, Wikipedia naturally ranks high > due to the number of links into it. Google then views Wikipedia as an > authoritative source. > > Not perfect, but in most cases, pretty darn good. > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=32046 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
