Learning to Love the Panopticon

mitd writes: "Cory Doctrow has written an insightful article about Google, search engines and how he stopped worrying."

Comments

incredibly short-term viewpoint

[AdamBa]

1) Google sucks. All search engines suck right now. Altavista may suck 99% and Google may only suck 97%, but they are all terrible, and will remain so until they can actually start to understand what a page is about. The author may bag on AI, and it it bad now, but it's the only hope for workable search engines in the future.

2) What is this absolute crapola about how bytes are more reliable than allegedly "fragile" books? Does this tubesteak realize that there are 500 year old books that are completely legible, while 15-year-old electronic data is unreadable? Yeesh. The only bright spot is that this guy's ravings are in electronic form, so future generations won't have to worry about them.

- adam

The /. contradiction in one sentence

[Anonymous Coward]

"I hate it how everything is being cached and observed and indexed, but I love it cuz its cool!!!"

Re:There's a problem with this

[guiding_knight]

In addition, what about all these /. links to google searches? Does google have a check in its programming to find links to itself? If not, as more and more people link to google searches, google could convince itself that it is the most authoritative site for any and every subject. I dunno about you, but I would find this very entertaining...

Re:Wrong about email

[guiding_knight]

Privacy concerns aside, if the google technique was applied to emails in the same manner, spam and pornography would be more prominent than any relevant info on many search pages. The sheer volume of this would tip google-style search results. I'm sure the spammers would love this, sending extra, no cost(to them) copies of spam to everyone at the NSA :)