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Mr Anti-Google
MrNovember writes "Salon is
running a story on some guy named Daniel Brandt who they call "Mr. Anti-Google." Mr. Brandt runs a sort of anti-establishment database of citations called NameBase as well as Google Watch. He claims that Google's PageRank system is undemocratic primarily because it doesn't rank his NameBase information very highly. He also points out that Google maintains a log of all you've ever searched for associated with a long-term cookie. Google's system seems to work the best if you ask me but, on the other hand, link popularity may not provide the most intelligent top rankings."
IF people decide they don't like Google they'll search somewhere else. We vote by our searches...
Fine with me if he wants to complain, Google still remains my number one search engine, due to its highly relavent results. You can whine all you want, but that doesn't change reality. ~geogeek
As for the point made that this guy thinks that Google is "undemocratic," give me a break! Google is not a government - it is a search site! They exist to make a profit. They will make money by providing a quality search result, thereby attracting users. They are not in the business of being the arbiter of democratic principles on the web.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I've thought for a while that, although Google is undoubtedly a fine search engine, it does make it difficult to get on it in the first place.
Since you need to have links to your site from other sites to get rated highly in Google, it is almost impossible to get them, as people who may be interested in linking to your site won't find it on Google.
Vivious circle, anyone?
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
-brian
To his agenda perhaps.
However Google isn't used by most folks as a directory - it's a search engine. It simply pulls up entries according to a formula (see pigeonrank for the inside scoop) and gives those back. No bias beyond what smart webmasters can impart, no artificial clustering, etc.
If Google were to start doing as Brandt wants it would quickly run into endless battles, loose it's searching edge, become just another pay(or agenda)-for-play roadkill.
No thanks.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
First Red Hat, now google, I guess when your on top you need to prepare for unsubstantiated criticism.
Upon reading the article, you find that Mr. Brandt's main complaint about Google is that he believes that when you type in, say, "Richard M. Nixon" into Google, the material he has compiled on Nixon should be ranked #1.
Okay, so I did a search on Nixon on Brandt's site. Here are the first couple of results:
(1) How the Vatican conspired to hide Nazi war criminals.
(2) How various activists were persecuted by the CIA and FBI.
Nowhere did I even SEE Nixon's name in these abstracts. The only relevance is that Nixon was alive at the time, or maybe president when some of them took place, but hardly the man personally responsible for all of them.
When I type "Nixon" into Google, I expect to see biographical material, both good and bad, not totally unrelated rantings. Google is doing its job, in my opinion. It is giving low rankings to Brandt's irrelevant materials. His complaints are pure self-centered sour grapes.
This guy's just whining because Google doesn't rank pages according to his crackheaded counterculture views? And this is news?
Google must be doing pretty well if this is the worst criticism they can find about them.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how is this a violation of your privacy? I mean, the whole thing is that you are using their service for free and willfully sending them the data that you choose. Everyone gets to choose what they search for in a search engine. This isn't private information in any real way. Google is providing you the free service of looking up words that you have intentionally provided. You don't like them being associated with a cookie? Refuse the damn cookie! Really paranoid? Go wander the web on your own without a search engine!
At what point were you guaranteed the free and anonymous use of a search engine? You're not being forced to use it. The world doesn't discriminate against people who do not choose not to efficiently search the web.
People like this are blurring the privacy issue and focusing attention away from legitimate privacy issues.
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
"I am some poor guy who runs a second-grade website and since I can't get google to list me high, I will elicit some news media to get my site slashdotted"
hope you like your servers toasty, bud.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What this guy wants, by abolishing PageRank, is a return to the free-for-all of early search engines, where the loudest voice rules. If one page has more keywords, it's ranked higher -- whether or not those keywords appear in the context of relevant content.
Here's his real problem: he thinks that linking to "Donald Rumsfeld" should bring his site's page to the top, despite the fact that he has no actual content -- just a list of links to other pages with content.
He calls this a failing of PageRank. I call it whining. If he wants more links from Google, he should get the word out about his site (preferably without manipulating Salon.com into doing it for him) and add some actual information about the people he's archiving by hand, instead of just building a big hotlist about them.
Basically, he wants to be the tyrant he imagines Google to be. Well, let him want all he likes. Google's popular because it's good and it's relevant; the fact that a tiny tiny minority think it's not isn't a good reason to overthrow the whole system.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. He should start by making changes on his own site, not insisting Google make changes on there.
This system isn't without flaws though, particularly in an online community such as Slashdot itself.
If for instance, some posted decided post a single link to some obscure worthless website that nobody's ever heard of, let alone linked to in a comment such as this one, it will be ranked accordingly to the total of slashdot's calculated 'popularity' based weight.
Google does not, and probably can not distinguish between actual content on this site and inane comments made by people such as myself.
Is this a large flaw? I really can't say, and I certainly don't have a solution to propose. I still say google is the best thing out there, and beats the hell out of inktomi's paid listings, which power an ever growing number of search engines.
in Google the sites that do well are the spammy sites, sites which have Google psyched out, and a lot of big sites, corporate headquarters' sites -- they show up before sites that criticize those companies."
In other words, Brandt recognizes that there has to be some order to Google's results, and that some sites might deserve to come up before others. He just disagrees with the way Google does it. In Brandt's ideal world, if you searched for "United Airlines," you would see untied.com -- a site critical of United -- before you see United's page. And if you searched for Rumsfeld, you'd see NameBase's dossier on him before the Defense Department's site on the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld."
He wants google to be a political action site that favors his views. He's a whiny little baby.
Sites that critisize corporations should appear before the corporations main site? Why? Did you search for the company or for criticism? If the company/group in question was something he agreed with, perhaps some environmental organization or the democratic national commitee, would he want criticism of them to come up first too?
A quick stop at google shows that if you search for "United Airlines" you get their site first, and the site he thinks should be first shortly thereafter. If you search for "United Airlines criticism" you get the site he reccommends first. Looks like google is doing it's job correctly to me.
Why is salon publishing the crap?
Soon to be announced: Google for Wackos! With a clean-cut, cookie-less interface free of CIA influence, Google for Wackos will return search results based not on the listed sites' popularity, but on the wackiness of the conspiracy theories they present. Most popular search terms include Zapruder, tin foil, UFOs, and of course sex (but only the dirty illegal kind that politicians have.)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The answer is in the article. Six years ago, everyone used Yahoo. Then Yahoo went all portal on us, so the smart geeks started using Altavista. Then Altavista started selling #1 listings, so we all decamped to Google. Now everyone uses Google.
Brandt's complaint appears to be that he has a database of citations, but when you search for Donald Rumsfeld his site is more than 10 pages down, where nobody ever looks. And that's fine with me. That's what I expect from Google. He obviously expects something else (like united.com appearing higher than United Airlines real site), and being the kind of person he apparently is, he expects Google to change to become how he expects them to be, rather than realigning his expectations with reality.
--
E_NOSIG
I never understand why people make such a big deal about cookies. If you don't want to be tracked (like me, like most of us here at slashdot) there are countless ways of protecting yourself via browser settings, CookieCop, Proximotron, etc. Anyone who really cares about privacy probably already knows how to disable cookies. And anyone who doesn't know probably doesn't care about privacy (my grandmother, etc.). It seems like people just enjoy complaining about a standard web technique even though it is easily circumventable.
Second, why the hell is slashdot even posting this article? I've skimmed plenty of the below comments and they all seem to agree that this anti-google guy is a goofball. Just because Salon ran an article on him doesn't mean that this fruitcake's complaints have any merit. Considering how many stories get rejected from slashdot on a daily basis, why was this chosen? Is it just me, or did anyone enjoy/learn from that article?
GMD
watch this
I run a modest webhosting business. Someone else runs a large, popular webhosting business who's name is very close to mine (two letters in the name are reversed). I have never ran any other webhosting business, while the other company has been doing this for years (under other names). This company registerd thier name 6 months after I registered mine, so they can be considered a copy-cat outfit. (i wont give my name, because that would be in bad taste, but as an example, assume I registered abchosting.com while the other guy registered acbhosting.com).
Anyways, a search for abchosting on google would give you acbhosting as the first result because the admin "accidently" mispelled acbhosting on several pages on his site. He also linked to that page from several different domains that he owns and therefore was ranked higher than my site.
PageRank sucks for this reason, and thats what the guy is complaining about.
I'm completely serious: Who posts links anymore? I have a couple of "neat site" links on my personal page, but I'm the exception: Very few people put up "sites I like" link sites, as was the case in the early days of the net where the PageRank system made sense. Indeed, the opposite is true and people intentionally don't link anymore, lest they lose eyeballs.
People no longer need index sites like Yahoo or "The Best Places To Buy Curry Beans in Toronto" because they have google...but google relies on links to do its rankings....you can see the paradox here: With every passing scan by the Google spider, Google's usefulness declines.
No kidding. As to the cookies: like some schmoe at Google really wants to sit down and follow my life history via my queries. And what will they do with it anyway, it's anonymous. I accepted their cookie to save preferences, but it's not like they know it's me personally. So at the best they will be able to connect the following queries: "ruby dbi", "emacs lisp", "annette bening", "minneapolis", and "regression analysis algorithm". BFD. We're all in a lot more danger from our ISPs who can log every packet we send and receive if they want to.
I do not have a signature
I'm sorry, I missed the "The most democratic search engine in the world" quote on the Google web site. Can someone post that link for me?
Google's page rank isn't democratic, and thank God for that. Otherwise I'd have to wade through a bunch of crap that I generally don't want to wade through.
Different search engines are better at searching for different things, but Google is my first choice almost every time. It is, by far, the most effective search engine I've seen. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be the most popular.
Someone explain to me why anyone pays attention to this guy.
Funny. If it was Microsoft, I doubt you all would be so forgiving.
If they track what you search for, so what? Unlike MS, Google don't expect you to get a stupid passport ID for every frickin' site on their network. MS can go "AH! Frank7689 checked his email, then went searching for nude pictures of Britney Spears, was quiet for several minutes, then went and played some online games."
With Google, "Oh look, a user searched for emacs, then "donkey porn" + "ass cock".
BIG DIFFERENCE. It's not hypocrisy. If Google decided we had to sign up for their service then yeah, big problem (but only if you told the truth when you signed up, and if you did, you're a moron).
Just because people bash MS doesn't mean they're mindless bashers. I personally don't give a hoot about MS, but I can see the difference between what Google are doing, and what MS would do.
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It's a search engine. You find info by typing names into a form. There are no obvious links to the content. How's that supposed to get spidered?
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His search engine is overloaded right now and just returns error messages. Maybe that's what Google sees.
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The good data is by subscription only:
"And ask your library or student government to subscribe to NameBase ($200 for two years of unrestricted access from any campus computer) so that we can continue to add names, and you can continue to find them."
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<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> can't be helping.
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This guy is very picky about who gets to spider him. Here's his "robots.txt" file:
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He uses one-pixel GIFs to trap spiders. He also uses cookies and web bugs, providing a long-winded explanation of why what he does is OK, but what Google does is evil.
In conclusion, this guy created his own problem.I run three web sites. Each is at the top of the Google rankings for its obvious keywords, and I've done nothing whatsoever to make that happen. I just have useful content that people like.
I don't get it - you go on at great lengths about what google should do; about how bad Pagerank is, and how it should be fixed. But you don't say why you're not doing it yourself.
/.'ers) think that Pagerank works, and works very well. If you believe otherwise, why don't you simply go ahead and prove it?
Google became what it is because it saw an unfilled niche, and filled it. They "built a better mousetrap", and the world did indeed beat a path to their door. There is nothing stopping you from doing the same. If you're half as smart as you seem to think you are, you should have no problem implementing a search engine, and becoming as successful as Google is now.
Google is NOT a public utility, nor is it any form of monopoly. It needs to be regulated just as much as YOUR site does.
Unlike so many other companies, Google got where it is today solely on the merits of it's technology. It didn't succeed by pumping millions of dollars into marketing, it didn't succeed by using underhanded business tactics to squash its' competitors. All it did was make the best product.
Contrary to your essay, I (and I think many
"In other words, Brandt recognizes that there has to be some order to Google's results, and that some sites might deserve to come up before others. He just disagrees with the way Google does it. In Brandt's ideal world, if you searched for "United Airlines," you would see untied.com -- a site critical of United -- before you see United's page. And if you searched for Rumsfeld, you'd see NameBase's dossier on him before the Defense Department's site on the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld."
So if you search for "Microsoft", all the "Microsoft sux0rs" pages should be first? Pardon me, but that'd be hilarious.
The only reason I'm negative to it, is because when you focus on the negative, you attract it to you. So you'll end up being just as bad in the end as those you critizise. I believe more in focusing on the POSITIVE.