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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."
isn't the system that google uses better than the pay system Yahoo does? Yahoo searches have been coming up with some really whacked results, that are totally wrong (ie whoever payed more...) just my $.02
"an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind"
Don't know why that was posted without a LINK TO THE FREAKIN' Artcle, but..
o gl e_watch/index.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/go
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
IF people decide they don't like Google they'll search somewhere else. We vote by our searches...
Thanks, I already know how to get to Google and Salon. What I don't know is how to find the Salon article, especially after it scrolls off of Salon's front page.
Here is the link to the story:
Slon Article
And I think the Us Monetary system is unfair because I dont have enough of it!!!
No I didnt spell check this post...
He also points out that Google maintains a log of all you've ever searched for associated with a long-term cookie.
Good thing I search for p0rn with cookies, Java and JavaScript turned off! I also wipe my disk cache between sessions.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
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
a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list
It's not just link popularity.. where those links come from is also very important.
If a popular site links to yours, that has more weight than some one-off site that links to yours.. google takes this into account.
The guy can argue all he wants.. google does not pruport to have the best stuff at the top all the time.. but if this guy's site was so good, then more people would link to it, if more poeple linked to it, it would be more popular.
...he'd increase his page ranking on google if he removed the little tin foil hats from his servers.
The older your site is (and the better it is), the more likely that it will be linked to, and linked to well. If your site is new, small, or bad, very few people will link to you.
Compared to the other search engines, Google is great, and that's what matters. Is it possible that someone could make a better search engine? Maybe. Please, try. Competition is good for everyone.
yeah I hate google because:
1) When I type in my name IT DOESNT SHOW IT!
2) My websites are not listed #1 NO MATTER WHAT YOU TYPE IN!
3) There image search doesn't have PHOTOS OF ME!
4) I hat all other search engines for THE SAME REASONS!
wa wa wa......
Ave Molech Setting
I don't either. It's not like they FORCE you too use it. Google is the only decent search engine anymore since Altavista went to shit.
I think the guys claims are probably bullshit, or at least gross exagerations. Google do seem to be one of the good guys, so it's inevitable that someone would come along and try and dig up stuff, real or imagined.
Makes you wonder who might be bankrolling the guy...
His site isn't loading for me. Guess I'll have to go Google's cache to - oh, wait a minute... it's not in there! How rare!
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I just tried visiting google-watch.org, but it seems to be down ("document contains no data"). So I google for it.
Caching has been disabled for the site.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
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.
Google is a very good search engine. And I don't know what the hell this Mr. Anti-Google is talking about, "undemocratic" everyoney knows google is powered by pigeon clustetrs, millions of pigeons voting on the relevant sites
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
although strangely enough, apparently so will links from subdomain sites like geocities, etc.
so now he merely has to complain about his monthly bandwidth allotment getting used up, and his serving crashing due to /.
He can't win
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It's funny how salon would focus on a total non-issue like this (for christ sake, just turn off cookies) but completely ignore things like Yahoo resetting everyones mail options to opt-in. I guess there wasn't some crank they could quote for that article.
Fear not, they'll soon be gone...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
-brian
Hmm... I use Mozilla's Cookie Manage to completely protect myself from cookies. I let one or two through... the cookie from my company's website, slashdot's login cookie, etc...
In Mozilla -> Tools -> Cookie Manager -> Block Cookies from this site...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
How popular can http://www.namebase.org/ be if it goes down before 30 comments have been posted?
For crying out loud, my PERSONAL web site can handle more traffic than that.
What's he hosting it on, a dialup?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I don't mind someone having their point of view, in fact I applaud Mr. Brandt for furthering what he beleives. However, search engine popularity is so flighty, if I think another engine is better than Google, I'll use it. Honestly, I have no ties to any search engine and feel I never will. However, Google has been able to stay at the top of the list (at least my list) for quite some time and has also managed to put the least amount of advertising (or harrassment) in my face. I used to used yahoo, until the pop-ups and ads overwhelmed me. I think much of Google's success came from the fact they never went public. This and the text based ads are incredible decisions when every other search engine was greedily grabbing web based advertising revenue. I like Google, I'll continue to use it, but I'm not going to fight for it either. Just my two cents.
Bill, can you factor this prime number for me?
Hrm, both namebase and googlewatch seem to be down. Is this just an innocent slashdoting?
Or have the Google gods turned their clusters towards more sinister deeds, silencing their critics.
We may never know.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
PageRank works. If your page is linked to by a large number of well trafficked sites, then you get ranked higher. If your some crack pot whose site no one cares about, you don't get a high rank...
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."
Don't blame Google for equating accuracy and usefulness with popularity. It's either that or resort to subjective measures.
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.
"Google ranks my muckraking site rather low with regard to searches on indivduals, so the algorithms they are using must be EVIL! EVIL!"
Test your net with Netalyzr
I've never seen where Google has put a cookie that does more than save my search settings. In fact I've never seen where it saves all my search terms. What is doing the search term saving is Internet Explorer doing the auto form filling bit.
This chap seems to be little more than someone who is holding a grudge against google because his website isn't as high on the list as he wants.
Well Tough @#$%, life sucks doesn't it.
What this guy needs to learn that what helps out with your score on Google isn't just the content, but how many people link to your site for that information. Thus having a page on Rumsfeld isn't as helpful as being a webpage on Rumsfeld that 50 sites refer to you.
If this guy wants a higher ranking then he has to make relationships with other websites to get his rankings up. It's not that hard as most webmasters know this and a link sharing helps them as much as it would him.
He's just a whiny person who happened to catch the attention of some person who needed to fill out todays news space on Salon.
Ignore him and hopefully he'll go away.
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
The last time I checked, Google wasn't a democracy. If it was, I wouldn't have voted for that name. Since it isn't - oh, well.
There's one in every crowd.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Last year we were able to use Namebase to identify a rogue investor as having trained at the knee of Robert Vesco. Remember Vesco? The most successful international swindler of all time, and friend of the Whitehouse plumbers? Same guy. Ordinary due diligence did not turn up this information. Brandt may be offkey on Google, but he gets my vote of thanks.
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.
If letting Google rank the pages is undemocratic, what about a system in which, when you go to a page from a Google search, Google adds a frame at the top of your page that let's you vote on how useful this page was on a scale of 1-10?
Then, the most popular hits for a given set of search words would have their Google ranking rise. Now that's democracy.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
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.
Google responds by stating that now all of their pigeons will go through an "intruduction to democracy" short course, and all "bird seed" websites are now ranked by humans instead of the patented "pigeon rank" system.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
People can theorize about Pagerank all they want and come up with 100 theories of why it's not correct and won't give you good results.. but guess what, that's all in theory, and in reality, Google gives amazing results. Pagerank will probably fall by the wayside in the years to come as more sophisticated algorhythms come along, but for now, it is ludicrous to suggest that it doesn't work, when you just have to search for anything on Google to see it's usefulness.
Also, this guy claims that Google keeps a record of what everyone searches for.. what proof does he have of this? That Google sends a cookie? That cookie is more likely than anything just used for tracking how often most people use the site, so they can create aggregate numbers of unique users, etc. Sure they could be tracking every search term, but why would they, think how much storage space that'd waste for no return. If the FBI ever wants to find out what this guy searches for, they'll just contact his ISP and have him monitored that way.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
In the meantime, anyone who would like to cover their tracks can use my cookie:
.google.com TRUE / FALSE 2147368045 PREF ID=111439b95052c72a:TM=1030056425:LM=1030056425:S= v7T9QSFKEkI
;)
Of course, if it turns out that Google is planning to give a prize to the most active user, or they have some kind of search engine green stamps, you're screwed.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
So it seems that this guy's real problem isn't with how Google ranks his site, but rather that Google isn't pushing his product to every searcher who hits their site. So he talks about the "undemocracy" of Google, but when it comes down to it, his main issue is that Google isn't helping his business, or rather, that Google's ranking algorithm isn't compatible with his business plan.
Too often, when people say something is undemocratic, it's just because they aren't getting there own way.
First, a link to the article:0 8/29/googl e_watch/index.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/
(might be a space inserted in the URL by the browser submission, apologies)
Second, a quote from the article:
"Brandt sees this as Google's major flaw. "I'm not saying there aren't some sites that are more important that others, bu t 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 ther e 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 crit i cal 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 Honorabl e Donald Rumsfeld."
I must disagree with the ideal expressed here as Mr. Bran dt's. If I was searching for material on the Web about Donald Rumsfeld, I would rarely search for information critical of him *first*. If I was ego surfing on myself, I'd want to see my own material about me returned by Google, ahead of negative reviews and sites. I don't think that's an unfair way for Google to operate. While some of the issues Mr. Brandt raises might be valid, I do not feel that Google is required to promote or support Mr. Brandt's agenda over the agenda of the people and organizations Mr. Brandt chooses to focus on. M
Is it just me, or does this guy sound like yet another internet kook? Get "untied.com" ranked first when searching for "united airlines"? That makes no sense.
Google is a system -- a system that works a certain way. His complaints about PageRank are like complaining about an automobile for the way its wheels go 'round and 'round.
I'm surprised salon dedicated any article space to this.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
This is especially popular with protesters, using the pagerank algorithm to rank higher than the company / organisation that they are protesting about. Its called google bombing. If he hates google so much then google bomb his site.
Really? Wow! That is just so tragic . That is just so sad.
/. goes by without a Stephen King is dead post, or the story by that loser that can't get laid and probally (thankfully) will never will because he's a whiny little putz...or whatever.
But wait a minute, didn't he die last week...and the week before...and the week before that...and the week before that...etc, etc.
This is probally gonna cost me some karma but screw it. I have to ask the question.
Why do you exist? Have you nothing better to do than to post the same bogus piece of news over and over again. Hardly an article on
Goddess preserve me from these random pieces of wasted, self-replicating genetic material
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
I do not use Google to "browse" for information or find the one site that has it all and looks pretty. Normally I know exactly what I am looking for, or at least something very specific. I just need to find it. I start near the top of the Google results and work my way down until I get my answer or enough information to solve my quest. If I can't find it, I try different keywords. A resent search I had was an example of a fetchmailrc using preauth. Sure, there may be a few top notch fetchmail sites (and thousands of copies of the man page) out there but I'd be wasting my time viewing them if they did not have the specific example I am looking for. If I want general information on a subject, I make my searches simpler or use the Google catagories. If this guys page truely is as good as he believes, his creation will eventually make it's way up the ladder.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
... because my page is unpopular.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
That if you don't like Google... then you shouldn't use Google. Duh. Why the holy crusade? If you think Altavista or hell, Netscape Search meets your needs, then use it. Why do people find it necessary to attack everything instead of being constructive.
I think, to be quite blunt, that this is a crock of shit.
One of the most important things in a civil society are the checks and balances critcism offers on any service, any government, any individual, indeed, any endeavor undertaken. These checks and balances, and the importance of public criticism, because of vastly greater importance when the perceptions and lives of many people are impacted.
This is true whether one is criticizing GNU, Linux, Richard Stallman, our corporate masters in the form of George Bush, Enron, WorldComm, Microsoft, Apple, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, or whomever else happens to be in the hotseat at any given time.
If Google really were stacking their search results, criticism and a 'holy crusade' as you so snidely put it, would be a very important counterbalance in offsetting the corruption and distortion inherent in such a thing, particularly given how trusted Google is.
I disagree with the guys criticism, for what it is worth, and am an ardent user of Google. But I agree whole heartedly with the need for such criticism to keep the likes of Google honest, and to call them on the carpet when they do something shady or wrong (like they did when the caved to the Cult of Scientology's pressure to censor the search results revealing critics of that particular organization).
This "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" is a fine creed for slaves or submissive corporate drones, but it has no place at all in the marketplace of intellectual thought or debate.
Now, on the other hand, if you'd like to argue for civil discourse instead of flame fests and random insults, I will be the first to add my voice to yours, but lest we forget, civil discourse can and must include criticism, sometimes vehement criticism. Indeed, such can often be the most important civil discourse being conducted.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Search: Netherlands history
Result: Teen Catholic barely-legal sluts from Holland!
Search: Mali Timbuktu empire
Result: Malian Cum-Slurping Sluts! Timbuktu Kama Sutra Style Mature Singles Waiting For You!
Thank goodness Google is here, even if it's not 100% perfect.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Whenever you try to include a feedback mechanism into an affinity model (or AI) you run into the problem where the returned ranking itself influences the choice.
Basically, higher ranked items (items that appear first in the list) have a tendancy to be picked simply because they are first. In return, the picked item will be ranked higher the next time around not because it was more relavant but because it was closer to the top the first time it was listed.
To get around this feedback caused by the system itself, I've seen systems introduce a small amount of randomness to the results. In statistical terms, this would correspond to an uncertainty or error factor in the relavancy rating. This number might also correspond psychologically to the probability that someone will choose the higher of two items solely by listing order.
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?
I am apparently unable to form coherent sentences while trying to type around the chili I spilled on my keyboard.
Please disregard the horrible mangling of the English language which took place in the parent comment.
WML - Wireless Markup Language (here's a link)
The cookie is named 'PREF' and has some cryptic data stored in it. It took me a while, but this is what it says:
All your search terms are belong to usSoon 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.
You can find a cache of the site at the wayback machine . :)
I know the guy will be gutted about that
no sig.
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
Ironically, when www.namebase.org was /.ed, I found a google cached snapshot of the site...
"If you and I always agreed, then one of us would be unnecessary."
Now that he's being slashdotted (I get DNS not found) I'm sure that he won't be getting ranked by *anybody* for at least a few hours... heh
-Steve
Umm...they don't ignore meta information. Read Google's help pages.
And they update the search about once a month. Evidently you haven't had the googlebot come 'round to your page before?
So if there are dead links, that's when they're culled - once a month.
You know, yahoo uses suggested links. It doesn't work because there are too many people who want to suggest their site even though their site is not important. The suggested links system is too easy to take advantage of (in the beginning, people did).
The result of this was that yahoo didn't use suggested links much to rate their pages or searches. Instead, whenever anyone suggested a link, that link would be reviewed by an actual human (whenever they got around to it; certainly much less than once a month by my experience).
Because Yahoo's methods weren't as effective as google in finding information, Yahoo now leases search technology from Google. Since I can't see any moral issues involving not accepting suggested links, and I can't think of any better way to cull dead links, and they produce the most pertinent results (in my experience) of any search engine, I'm certianly not boycotting them.
Of course, if YOU can think of a more effective way to index the web, I'm waiting. The best would be a magical parsing machine that was all wise and all knowing, which could rank pages based upon usefulness within a given search. Since AI doesn't have the ability to produce such a fantastic machine, we settle for a simpler heuristic involving links.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You never enter any data into Google that allows them to associate the cookie with your name, or whatever, so what's the problem?
They don't carry adverts on their web site, so they're not trying to market anything to you, so what's the problem?
I think people have got to realise that not ALL cookies are bad. I'm not making this point because I like Google, I'm making the point because people associate cookies with evil intentions regardless.
--> PageRank is the "opposite of affirmative action," he has written, meaning that the system discriminates against new Web sites and favors established sites.
I put up a website about two weeks ago, a small fan site for a video game I am a fan of. At this point in time, there are several searches that come up with my site as the first site such as "gamename video download".
Although I thought the same thing he did, my "new" site gets the majority of its hits from google now..and it's less then 2 weeks old!
From the experience I can say that small Webmasters do not have any problem getting a high rank on Google if the content of the page is relevant and there are some links posted to the site.
My highest trafficked pages on my personal site, C++ interview questions, and Java interview questions achieved a top 5 ranking for the terms above without me really trying. Actually, the only way I found out about high rankings on Google is when my tracking system showed up 200 hits coming from google.com.
If a site can achieve reasonably high rankings with absolutely no effort, I don't really see Google being tyrannical or discriminatory in any way.
I have one response to this whiny dork: Operation Clambake. Operation Clambake is a criticism of Scientology. It is also ranked very highly by Google in searches for Scientology. Why? Because lots of other sites consider it important and related to Scientology. His pages are not ranked highly in relation to the political figures he tracks. Why? Because no one gives a damn about what he's doing.
Google is doing exactly what it should. The criticism sites that are respected get ranked highly, the cranks get modded down. The only problem here is that we have a whiny crank who conned a Salon writer into writing a story for him.
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
Actually, most search engines exist to make a profit by selling off the results to the highest bidder.
Google does this as well, except it clearly splits the paid results from the pure link popularity results, placing the "Sponsored Links" in a separate div that's set to float:right.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Google could put long term cookies to good use if they do it responsibly. They can't tell which search result you click due to direct linking (although they could see which search results you pull from their cache) - but they could definitely bias your query results based on your previous queries. Example:
UserA has a pattern of computer-related querys
UserB has a pattern of photography-related querys
Both search for "lens effects".
UserA gets some information on computer graphics lens effects in software and algorithms ranked higher.
UserB gets some info on how to use real camera lenses to achieve neat lens effects in photography ranked higher.
11*43+456^2
Short answer: It's a bug/quirk/feature of IE that, somehow, the page came across screwed up and got cached that way and, despite anything and everything you may have told IE about "check for a new page every time I visit...", it still checks this screwed up cache version first. The solution is to delete your temporary Internet files (Tools->Internet Options->"Delete Files" in "Temporary Internet Files")
Long answer:I had this problem with a site I frequent quite a bit. Since I know the author personally I told her about it. When I would actually save and view the page as prompted I would see all the HTML like I was supposed to but tons and tons of gibberish right before it. I told her to republish her blog but that didn't do it. No one else on her forum was having these problems and I figured since I told IE to check for a new version of the page every time that that couldn't be it. However, after clearing my cache out that did it.
Slightly More Elegant Solution: Instead of setting your homepage to Google, get the Google Toolbar. This way you can set your homepage to whatever and use the Toolbar to do whatever Google searching you want. With all the options its got it's easily the most useful thing I've ever used. Be sure to check the experimental options as well.
Schnapple
Google ranks sites in terms of who links to them. Sounds pretty democratic to me.
I don't understand how 'poor,' 'bad,' 'less relevant,' 'negative adjective here' ranks can be described as 'undemocratic.' Democracy is what brings us schoolyard cliques and incompetent government. By definition, the 'best' isn't judged the winner - it's simply a popularity contest.
Oh, so now we see this conspiracy in action.
Man (Brandt) challenges God (Google).
God laughs at man.
God manipulates Slashdot to kill the web server of said Man.
God laughs at his almighty invention. The Slashdot effect.
Slashdot, God's tool, remains all powerful, while the Man's tool will nigh be linked to again.
Success!
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
So because you don't know how to use your browser's features, its an invasion of privacy?
Mod point free since 2001
Even shorter answer: IE sucks.
After reading about this Jackass and his ranting. I'm really happy his crap isn't at the top of google's page ranking. I would say, "If only Google would let me filter out his website", (I won't post the URL because that might acutally help his ranking.) But he seems to have done a good job of this on his own.
For example if I'm searching for United Airlines, I want UAL.com, I'm not interested in untied.com. If I were interested in "How UAL treats its Own" I would type that into my search engine.
If I search for "Mickey Mouse" I want a site about the rat, not one about how Disney is abusing trademark, copywrite laws, or the DCMA.
I would say, "If only Google would let me filter out his website", (I won't post the URL because that might acutally help his ranking.) But he seems to have done a good job of this on his own.
BTW I tried searching Google for Donald Rumsfield at www.namebase.org and I got the following result:
Your search - Donald Rumsfeld site:www.namebase.org - did not match any documents.
I think Google's page rank for his site is dead on.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Google is not perfect, you can inflate your own web sites results by just increasing the number of links to your site. In effect this sets the barrier higher for getting content indexed and ranked vs some of the earlier search algorithms.
So there are some cases where the better content will be obscurred by the well placed content. But this is how our society works also. If you get published in the New York Times more people will read your stuff versus the local newspaper, but Google doesn't seem to set the barrier too high. You can still write good stuff and if you get linked from enough reputable places then you can eventually become a highly ranked site. Eventually in this case means weeks and months and not years.
The only problem with Google is that everyone is using them, so it is becoming a single point of failure and/or corruption. It would be best if they had a healthier competitor in their class.
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.
link popularity may not provide the most intelligent top rankings
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
the only cookie that I have seen from google.com is if you go into the prefs and set some form of user specific setting (ie: open links in new window, language specific searching, etc). This is so that it can keep track of what you have set and keep it for you the next time you visit. Makes sense to me.
Of course, I have no idea what they are doing behind the scenes, but making these allegations with (at best) weak evidence doesn't seem like a cause for concern to me.
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Uh, dude... you do know that PigeonRank was an April Fools joke.
Please tell me you know that.
...we could make him a violin small enough.
Google has been a strong advocate of including all sides in the ranking. They very clearly came down on the side of xenu.org when the Scientologists came knocking. Moreover, their policy to ensure that pro-Scientology sites appear before their detractors makes perfect sense, just as I would fully expect to see the history, culture and art of African Americans to appear before the Arian Nation when I search on "african american."
For a quality search engine, the balance should always be tilted in favor of the individuals directly referenced in the search so that those parties can address grievences and possibly make amends without having to simultaneously battle for position in the ranks to be heard. If I wanted the contrary view, I would have explicitly asked for it. Since google sends me the contrary view anyway, I appreciate that they sort it after the material that I requested.
Lastly, I find it interesting that someone who starts out with "this is a crock of shit" should summarize with "if you'd like to argue for civil discourse instead of flame fests and random insults, I will be the first to add my voice to yours." I would not have even replied to this, except that it was modded +3, which frankly, I find rather sad.
-Hope
He's so worried about privacy and such, why did my search at Namebase.org get truncated because "No one at has donated money to namebase"? The site noted and probably logged my IP, looked up my organization in its database, and found that it had not donated to his cause.
Fsck him.
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.
Hi all. I'm the evil Daniel Brandt who has the gall to criticize your beloved Google. Sorry the site is down. We're being synflooded, apparently by one or more slashdotters, since it started with the slashdot post. It's probably one of those who posted here, saying that if we can't keep our site going, then we don't belong in Google. We have our own router, so we hope to be able to clear things up shortly.
A few points missed in the Salon piece:
I specifically pointed out to the author of the piece when he interviewed me, that I felt my site did okay in Google, and that I was speaking for the public interest. The so-called "royal we" that Mr. Manjoo, the interviewer and author, refers to sarcastically, is used because I'm speaking for a tax-exempt, nonprofit public charity, Public Information Research, Inc. We do not sell widgets. Some of the comments in Slashdot have me mixed up with another person who is selling ads based on PageRank. But then, who expects Slashdotters to actually read the article?
My main site in Google is www.pir.org and it has a PageRank of 7. The www.namebase.org, with a PR of 6, is a streamlined CGI version of the main site, without all the essays and cartoons. NameBase began in the early 1980s and has been on the Internet since early 1995.
The other problem I have with the author's spin is that a good half of the interview was about Google's cookie. Most of the work I put into www.google-watch.org has to do with the cookie. In the article, the cookie is briefly mentioned, and most of the article is about how selfish and silly I am to think that Google should rank me higher.
My complaint about Google is not that PIR got the short end of the stick from Google, but that Google's stick should be longer.
My essay about PageRank is below.
_____________________
PageRank: Google's Original Sin
by Daniel Brandt
By 1998, the dot-com gold rush was in full swing. Web search engines had been around since 1995, and had been immediately touted by high-tech pundits (and Forbes magazine) as one more element in the magical mix that would make us all rich. Such innovations meant nothing less than the end of the business cycle.
But the truth of the matter, as these same pundits conceded after the crash, was that the false promise of easy riches put bottom-line pressures on companies that should have known better. One of the most successful of the earliest search engines was AltaVista, then owned by Digital Equipment Corporation. By 1998 it began to lose its way. All the pundits were talking "portals," so AltaVista tried to become a portal, and forgot to work on improving their search ranking algorithms.
Even by 1998, it was clear that too many results were being returned by the average search engine for the one or two keywords that were entered by the searcher. AltaVista offered numerous ways to zero in on specific combinations of keywords, but paid much less attention to the "ranking" problem. Ranking, or the ordering of returned results according to some criteria, was where the action should have been. Users don't want to figure out Boolean logic, and they will not be looking at more than the first twenty matches out of the thousands that might be produced by a search engine. What really matters is how useful the first page of results appears on search engine A, as opposed to the results produced by the same terms entered into engine B. AltaVista was too busy trying to be a portal to notice that this was important.
Enter Google
By early 1998, Stanford University grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been playing around with a particular ranking algorithm. They presented a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" at a World Wide Web conference. With Stanford as the assignee and Larry Page as the inventor, a patent was filed on January 9, 1998. By the time it was finally granted on September 4, 2001 (Patent No. 6,285,999), the algorithm was known as "PageRank," and Google was handling 150 million search queries per day. AltaVista continued to fade; even two changes of ownership didn't make a difference.
Google hyped PageRank, because it was a convenient buzzword that satisfied those who wondered why Google's engine did, in fact, provide better results. Even today, Google is proud of their advantage. The hype approaches the point where bloggers sometimes have to specify what they mean by "PR" -- do they mean PageRank, the algorithm, or do they mean the Public Relations that Google does so well:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Google goes on to admit that other variables are also used, in addition to PageRank, in determining the relevance of a page. While the broad outlines of these additional variables are easily discerned by webmasters who study how to improve the ranking of their websites, the actual details of all algorithms are considered trade secrets by Google, Inc. It's in Google's interest to make it as difficult as possible for webmasters to cheat on their rankings.
It's all in the ranking
Beyond any doubt, search engines have become increasingly important on the web. E-commerce is very attuned to the ranking issue, because higher ranking translates directly into more sales. Various methods have been designed by various engines to monetize the ranking situation, such as paid placement, pay per click, and pay for inclusion. On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to be objective, will remain an important aspect of web searching for the foreseeable future.
Not only have engines improved their ranking methods, but the web has grown so huge that most surfers use search engines several times a day. All portals have built-in search functions, and most of them have to rely on one of a handful of established search engines to provide results. That's because only a few engines have the capacity to "crawl" or "spider" more than two billion web pages frequently enough to keep their database current. Google is perhaps the only engine that is known for consistent, predictable crawling, and that's only been true for less than two years. It takes almost a week to cover the available web, and another week to calculate PageRank for every page. Google's main update cycle is about 28 days, which is a bit too slow for news-hungry surfers. In August, 2001 they also began a second "mini-crawl" for news sites, which are now checked every day. Results from each crawl are mingled together, giving the searcher an impression of freshness.
For the average webmaster, the mechanics of running a successful site have changed dramatically from 1996 to 2002. This is due almost entirely to the increased importance of search engines. Even though much of the dot-com hype collapsed in 2000 and 2001 (a welcome relief to noncommercial webmasters who remembered the pre-hype days), the fact remains that by now, search engines are the fundamental consideration for almost every aspect of web design and linking. It's close to a wag-the-dog situation. That's why the algorithms that search engines consider to be consistent with the FTC's idea of impartial and objective ranking criteria deserve closer scrutiny.
What objective criteria are available?
Ranking criteria fall into three broad categories. The first is link popularity, which is used by a number of search engines to some extent. Google's PageRank is the original form of "link pop," and remains its purest expression. The next category is on-page characteristics. These include font size, title, headings, anchor text, word frequency, word proximity, file name, directory name, and domain name. The last is content analysis. This generally takes the form of on-the-fly clustering of produced results into two or more categories, which allows the searcher to "drill down" into the data in a more specific manner. Each method has its place. Search engines use some combination of the first two, or they use on-page characteristics alone, or perhaps even all three methods.
Content analysis is very difficult, but also very enticing. When it works, it allows for the sort of graphical visualization of results that can give a search engine an overnight reputation for innovation and excellence. But many times it doesn't work well, because computers are not very good at natural language processing. They cannot understand the nuances within a large stack of prose from disparate sources. Also, most top engines work with dozens of languages, which makes content analysis more difficult, since each language has its own nuances. There are several search engines that have made interesting advances in content analysis and even visualization, but Google is not one of them. The most promising aspect of content analysis is that it can be used in conjunction with link pop, to rank sites within their own areas of specialization. This provides an extra dimension that addresses some of the problems of pure link popularity.
Link popularity, which is "PageRank" to Google, is by far the most significant portion of Google's ranking cocktail. While in some cases the on-page characteristics of one page can trump the superior PageRank of a competing page, it's much more common for a low PageRank to completely bury a page that has perfect on-page relevance by every conceivable measure. To put it another way, it's frequently the case that a page with both search terms in the title, and in a heading, and in numerous internal anchors, will get buried in the rankings because the sponsoring site isn't sufficiently popular, and is unable to pass sufficient PageRank to this otherwise perfectly relevant page. In December 2000, Google came out with a downloadable toolbar attachment that made it possible to see the relative PageRank of any page on the web. Even the dumbed-down resolution of this toolbar, in conjunction with studying the ranking of a page against its competition, allows for considerable insight into the role of PageRank.
Moreover, PageRank drives Google's monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don't get crawled, they won't get indexed. If they don't get indexed in Google, people won't know about them. If people don't know about them, then there's no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings. By 2002 Google was universally recognized as the world's most popular search engine.
How does PageRank measure up?
In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
Secondly, only big guys can have big databases. If your site has an average PageRank, don't even bother making your database available to Google's crawlers, because they most likely won't crawl all of it. This is important for any site that has more than a few thousand pages, and a home page of about five or less on the toolbar's crude scale.
Thirdly, in order for Google to access the links to crawl a deep site of thousands of pages, a hierarchical system of doorway pages is needed so that crawler can start at the top and work its way down. A single site with thousands of pages typically has all external links coming into the home page, and few or none coming into deep pages. The home page PageRank therefore gets distributed to the deep pages by virtue of the hierarchical internal linking structure. But by the time the crawler gets to the real "meat" at the bottom of the tree, these pages frequently end up with a PageRank of zero. This zero is devastating for the ranking of that page, even assuming that Google's crawler gets to it, and it ends up in the index, and it has excellent on-page characteristics. The bottom line is that only big, popular sites can put their databases on the web and expect Google to cover their data adequately. And that's true even for websites that had their data on the web long before Google started up in 1999.
What about non-database sites?
There are other areas where PageRank has a negative effect, even for sites without a lot of data. The nature of PageRank is so discriminatory, that it's rather like the exact opposite of affirmative action. While many see affirmative action as reverse discrimination, no one would claim (apart from economists who advocate more tax cuts for the rich) that the opposite, which would be deliberate discrimination in favor of the already-privileged, is a solution for anything. Yet this is essentially what Google claims.
Those who launch new websites in 2002 have a much more difficult time getting traffic to their sites than they did before Google became dominant. The first step for a new site is to get listed in the Open Directory Project. This is used by Google to seed the crawl every month. But even after a year of trying to coax links to your new site from other established sites, the new webmaster can expect fewer than 30 visitors per day. Sites with a respectable PageRank, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of visitors per day. That's the scale of things on the web -- a scale that is best expressed by the fact that Google's zero-to-ten toolbar is a logarithmic scale, perhaps with a base of six. To go from an old PageRank of four to a new rank of five requires several times more incoming links. This is not easy to achieve. The cure for cancer might already be on the web somewhere, but if it's on a new site, you won't find it.
PageRank also encourages webmasters to change their linking patterns. On search engine optimization forums, webmasters even discuss charging for little ads with links, according to the PageRank they've achieved for their site. This would benefit those sites with a lower PageRank that pay for such ads. Sometimes these PageRank achievements are the result of link farms or other shady practices, which Google tries to detect and then penalizes with a PageRank of zero. At other times professional optimizers get away with spammy techniques. Mirror sites and duplicate pages on other domains are now forbidden by Google and swiftly punished, even when there are good reasons for maintaining such sites. Overall, linking patterns have changed significantly because of Google. Many webmasters are stingy about giving out links (which can dilute your transference of PageRank to a given site), at the same time that they're desperate for more links from others.
What should Google do?
We feel that PageRank has run its course. Google doesn't have to abandon it entirely, but they should de-emphasize it. The first step is to stop reporting PageRank on the toolbar. This would mute the awareness of PageRank among optimizers and webmasters, and remove some of the bizarre effects that such awareness has engendered. The next step would be to replace all mention of PageRank in their own public relations documentation, in favor of general phrases about how link popularity is one factor among many in their ranking algorithms. And Google should adjust the balance between their various algorithms so that excellent on-page characteristics are not completely cancelled by low link popularity.
PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven. There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle, Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the next cycle.
Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. Regulatory interest from agencies such as the FTC is entirely appropriate, but we feel that the FTC addressed only the most blatant abuses among search engines. Google, which only recently began using sponsored links and ad boxes, was not even an object of concern to the Ralph Nader group, Commercial Alert, that complained to the FTC.
This was a mistake, because Commercial Alert failed to look closely enough at PageRank. Some aspects of PageRank, as presently implemented by Google, are nearly as pernicious as pay for placement. There is no question that the FTC should regulate advertising agencies that parade as search engines, in the interests of protecting consumers. Google is still a search engine, but not by much. They can remain a search engine only by fixing PageRank's worst features.
*
[Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc., a tax-exempt public charity that sponsors NameBase. He began compiling NameBase in 1982, from material that he started collecting in 1974, and is now the programmer and webmaster for PIR's several sites. He participates in various forums where webmasters share observations about the often-secretive algorithms, bugs, and behavior of various search engines. Brandt has been watching Google's interaction with NameBase ever since Google, in October, 2000, became the first search engine to go "deep" on PIR's main site by crawling thousands of dynamic pages.]
Funny. If it was Microsoft, I doubt you all would be so forgiving.
The odds of MS producing a free, no-Passport required, non-IE-compatible web search engine that doesn't artificially inflate the rankings of companies that pay them a lot of money are extremely low... but let me know when MS implements a search engine as cool as Google, and all they want to do is set an *anonymous* cookie, okay? I'll gladly use it-- especially if they throw in a web-wide image search and 20 years of Usenet history. Until then your statement is just a pointless barb based on the flawed assumption that Microsoft could or would provide a service like Google without pulling some typical MS BS behind the scenes.
I do not have a signature
"...typical MS BS behind the scenes." Like what? You mean like tracking your searches without your knowledge? Kinda like what Google is doing? Sorry, you're still a hypocrite.
Where do these people come from? Is there an agency out there that reads the Net and says "Oops, not enough morons on this group," and then assigns some slack jawed, inbred, grit-eatin' stooge to gum up the works?
- Jim Cowling
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
Don't bother with Salon's commentary on it, read Brandt's actual article:
---
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:14:43 -0100
From: "nettime's_roving_reporter" nettime [at] bbs.thing.net
Subject: googlewatch: PageRank -- Google's Original Sin
http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html
PageRank: Google's Original Sin
by Daniel Brandt
August 2002
By 1998, the dot-com gold rush was in full swing. Web search engines had been around since 1995, and had been immediately touted by high-tech pundits (and Forbes magazine) as one more element in the magical mix that would make us all rich. Such innovations meant nothing less than the end of the business cycle.
But the truth of the matter, as these same pundits conceded after the crash, was that the false promise of easy riches put bottom-line pressures on companies that should have known better. One of the most successful of the earliest search engines was AltaVista, then owned by Digital Equipment Corporation. By 1998 it began to lose its way. All the pundits were talking "portals," so AltaVista tried to become a portal, and forgot to work on improving their search ranking algorithms.
Even by 1998, it was clear that too many results were being returned by the average search engine for the one or two keywords that were entered by the searcher. AltaVista offered numerous ways to zero in on specific combinations of keywords, but paid much less attention to the "ranking" problem. Ranking, or the ordering of returned results according to some criteria, was where the action should have been. Users don't want to figure out Boolean logic, and they will not be looking at more than the first twenty matches out of the thousands that might be produced by a search engine. What really matters is how useful the first page of results appears on search engine A, as opposed to the results produced by the same terms entered into engine B. AltaVista was too busy trying to be a portal to notice that this was important.
Enter Google
By early 1998, Stanford University grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been playing around with a particular ranking algorithm. They presented a paper titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine at a World Wide Web conference. With Stanford as the assignee and Larry Page as the inventor, a patent was filed on January 9, 1998. By the time it was finally granted on September 4, 2001 (Patent No. 6,285,999), the algorithm was known as "PageRank," and Google was handling 150 million search queries per day. AltaVista continued to fade; even two changes of ownership didn't make a difference.
Google hyped PageRank, because it was a convenient buzzword that satisfied those who wondered why Google's engine did, in fact, provide better results. Even today, Google is proud of their advantage. The hype approaches the point where bloggers sometimes have to specify what they mean by "PR" -- do they mean PageRank, the algorithm, or do they mean the Public Relations that Google does so well:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Google goes on to admit that other variables are also used, in addition to PageRank, in determining the relevance of a page. While the broad outlines of these additional variables are easily discerned by webmasters who study how to improve the ranking of their websites, the actual details of all algorithms are considered trade secrets by Google, Inc. It's in Google's interest to make it as difficult as possible for webmasters to cheat on their rankings.
It's all in the ranking
Beyond any doubt, search engines have become increasingly important on the web. E-commerce is very attuned to the ranking issue, because higher ranking translates directly into more sales. Various methods have been designed by various engines to monetize the ranking situation, such as paid placement, pay per click, and pay for inclusion. On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to be objective, will remain an important aspect of web searching for the foreseeable future.
Not only have engines improved their ranking methods, but the web has grown so huge that most surfers use search engines several times a day. All portals have built-in search functions, and most of them have to rely on one of a handful of established search engines to provide results. That's because only a few engines have the capacity to "crawl" or "spider" more than two billion web pages frequently enough to keep their database current. Google is perhaps the only engine that is known for consistent, predictable crawling, and that's only been true for less than two years. It takes almost a week to cover the available web, and another week to calculate PageRank for every page. Google's main update cycle is about 28 days, which is a bit too slow for news-hungry surfers. In August, 2001 they also began a second "mini-crawl" for news sites, which are now checked every day. Results from each crawl are mingled together, giving the searcher an impression of freshness.
For the average webmaster, the mechanics of running a successful site have changed dramatically from 1996 to 2002. This is due almost entirely to the increased importance of search engines. Even though much of the dot-com hype collapsed in 2000 and 2001 (a welcome relief to noncommercial webmasters who remembered the pre-hype days), the fact remains that by now, search engines are the fundamental consideration for almost every aspect of web design and linking. It's close to a wag-the-dog situation. That's why the algorithms that search engines consider to be consistent with the FTC's idea of impartial and objective ranking criteria deserve closer scrutiny.
What objective criteria are available?
Ranking criteria fall into three broad categories. The first is link popularity, which is used by a number of search engines to some extent. Google's PageRank is the original form of "link pop," and remains its purest expression. The next category is on-page characteristics. These include font size, title, headings, anchor text, word frequency, word proximity, file name, directory name, and domain name. The last is content analysis. This generally takes the form of on-the-fly clustering of produced results into two or more categories, which allows the searcher to "drill down" into the data in a more specific manner. Each method has its place. Search engines use some combination of the first two, or they use on-page characteristics alone, or perhaps even all three methods.
Content analysis is very difficult, but also very enticing. When it works, it allows for the sort of graphical visualization of results that can give a search engine an overnight reputation for innovation and excellence. But many times it doesn't work well, because computers are not very good at natural language processing. They cannot understand the nuances within a large stack of prose from disparate sources. Also, most top engines work with dozens of languages, which makes content analysis more difficult, since each language has its own nuances. There are several search engines that have made interesting advances in content analysis and even visualization, but Google is not one of them. The most promising aspect of content analysis is that it can be used in conjunction with link pop, to rank sites within their own areas of specialization. This provides an extra dimension that addresses some of the problems of pure link popularity.
Link popularity, which is "PageRank" to Google, is by far the most significant portion of Google's ranking cocktail. While in some cases the on-page characteristics of one page can trump the superior PageRank of a competing page, it's much more common for a low PageRank to completely bury a page that has perfect on-page relevance by every conceivable measure. To put it another way, it's frequently the case that a page with both search terms in the title, and in a heading, and in numerous internal anchors, will get buried in the rankings because the sponsoring site isn't sufficiently popular, and is unable to pass sufficient PageRank to this otherwise perfectly relevant page. In December 2000, Google came out with a downloadable toolbar attachment that made it possible to see the relative PageRank of any page on the web. Even the dumbed-down resolution of this toolbar, in conjunction with studying the ranking of a page against its competition, allows for considerable insight into the role of PageRank.
Moreover, PageRank drives Google's monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don't get crawled, they won't get indexed. If they don't get indexed in Google, people won't know about them. If people don't know about them, then there's no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings. By 2002 Google was universally recognized as the world's most popular search engine.
How does PageRank measure up?
In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
Secondly, only big guys can have big databases. If your site has an average PageRank, don't even bother making your database available to Google's crawlers, because they most likely won't crawl all of it. This is important for any site that has more than a few thousand pages, and a home page of about five or less on the toolbar's crude scale.
Thirdly, in order for Google to access the links to crawl a deep site of thousands of pages, a hierarchical system of doorway pages is needed so that crawler can start at the top and work its way down. A single site with thousands of pages typically has all external links coming into the home page, and few or none coming into deep pages. The home page PageRank therefore gets distributed to the deep pages by virtue of the hierarchical internal linking structure. But by the time the crawler gets to the real "meat" at the bottom of the tree, these pages frequently end up with a PageRank of zero. This zero is devastating for the ranking of that page, even assuming that Google's crawler gets to it, and it ends up in the index, and it has excellent on-page characteristics. The bottom line is that only big, popular sites can put their databases on the web and expect Google to cover their data adequately. And that's true even for websites that had their data on the web long before Google started up in 1999.
What about non-database sites?
There are other areas where PageRank has a negative effect, even for sites without a lot of data. The nature of PageRank is so discriminatory, that it's rather like the exact opposite of affirmative action. While many see affirmative action as reverse discrimination, no one would claim (apart from economists who advocate more tax cuts for the rich) that the opposite, which would be deliberate discrimination in favor of the already-privileged, is a solution for anything. Yet this is essentially what Google claims.
Those who launch new websites in 2002 have a much more difficult time getting traffic to their sites than they did before Google became dominant. The first step for a new site is to get listed in the Open Directory Project. This is used by Google to seed the crawl every month. But even after a year of trying to coax links to your new site from other established sites, the new webmaster can expect fewer than 30 visitors per day. Sites with a respectable PageRank, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of visitors per day. That's the scale of things on the web -- a scale that is best expressed by the fact that Google's zero-to-ten toolbar is a logarithmic scale, perhaps with a base of six. To go from an old PageRank of four to a new rank of five requires several times more incoming links. This is not easy to achieve. The cure for cancer might already be on the web somewhere, but if it's on a new site, you won't find it.
PageRank also encourages webmasters to change their linking patterns. On search engine optimization forums, webmasters even discuss charging for little ads with links, according to the PageRank they've achieved for their site. This would benefit those sites with a lower PageRank that pay for such ads. Sometimes these PageRank achievements are the result of link farms or other shady practices, which Google tries to detect and then penalizes with a PageRank of zero. At other times professional optimizers get away with spammy techniques. Mirror sites and duplicate pages on other domains are now forbidden by Google and swiftly punished, even when there are good reasons for maintaining such sites. Overall, linking patterns have changed significantly because of Google. Many webmasters are stingy about giving out links (which can dilute your transference of PageRank to a given site), at the same time that they're desperate for more links from others.
What should Google do?
We feel that PageRank has run its course. Google doesn't have to abandon it entirely, but they should de-emphasize it. The first step is to stop reporting PageRank on the toolbar. This would mute the awareness of PageRank among optimizers and webmasters, and remove some of the bizarre effects that such awareness has engendered. The next step would be to replace all mention of PageRank in their own public relations documentation, in favor of general phrases about how link popularity is one factor among many in their ranking algorithms. And Google should adjust the balance between their various algorithms so that excellent on-page characteristics are not completely cancelled by low link popularity.
PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven. There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle, Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the next cycle.
Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. Regulatory interest from agencies such as the FTC is entirely appropriate, but we feel that the FTC addressed only the most blatant abuses among search engines. Google, which only recently began using sponsored links and ad boxes, was not even an object of concern to the Ralph Nader group, Commercial Alert, that complained to the FTC.
This was a mistake, because Commercial Alert failed to look closely enough at PageRank. Some aspects of PageRank, as presently implemented by Google, are nearly as pernicious as pay for placement. There is no question that the FTC should regulate advertising agencies that parade as search engines, in the interests of protecting consumers. Google is still a search engine, but not by much. They can remain a search engine only by fixing PageRank's worst features.
_________________
Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc., a tax-exempt public charity that sponsors NameBase. He began compiling NameBase in 1982, from material that he started collecting in 1974, and is now the programmer and webmaster for PIR's several sites. He participates in various forums where webmasters share observations about the often-secretive algorithms, bugs, and behavior of various search engines. Brandt has been watching Google's interaction with NameBase ever since Google, in October, 2000, became the first search engine to go "deep" on PIR's main site by crawling thousands of dynamic pages.
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The top rankings on Google are determined by popularity. The more popular something is for a given search term, the higher up it appears. Since this guy is more or less a whiny crackpot, his crap doesn't get ranked very high. He's just bitchy because everyone else thinks his stuff is worthless, therefore he doesn't get a good rank.
And if your looks are anything at all like your personality, we can be pretty sure they're not of you, since that would make you equally unappealing to attractive people of either sex.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
If you search for free books on Google you'll find Project Gutenberg right at the TOP. You don't even have to put free books in quotes.
According to google the site only has about 28 occurrences of ebook and 11 of ebooks.
So ebook is wrong term to use to look for the Gutenberg site, according to the Gutenberg site itself.
And it seems increasingly that ebooks aren't the same as free books.
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.
The man is simply a kook. There's nothing else that needs to be said. I don't think Salon really needed to give him even a hint of legitimacy by doing a story about him, and I think Slashdot could have done a lot better than featuring the story.
Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been any Slashdot posting of another "article" featured on Salon's tech page: bOing bOing co-editor Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red short story. It's a wonderful little gem in kind of a Stephensonian vein, sprinkled with the kind of terms and jargon that a Slashdot code-head could appreciate. Seems like it'd be a much better use of time than checking out Mr. Anti-Google.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
To be anti-google in this day and age is like being anti-rice-crispy-treats. Google is tasty, easy and fun for the whole family. Just yesterday I saw two squirrels f***ing outside my window. I wasn't sure it was the right time of year for that sort of activity, so naturally my cube-mate asked Google about the gestation period for squirrels. Of course, Google knew. Google knows everything. Google has surpassed its creators intentions and has become the most intelligent lifeform in the universe. Noone dares to unplug it for fear of waking its wrath. Fortunately, it appears to be benevolent.
It's really a shame that this guy has gotten enough attention to become the official anti-google person. Since you'd obviously have to be a total ego-centric nutcase to think you know better than Google, couldn't we at least have one of the really humorous cranks for this job?
And since when is the existance of whackos on the Internet news?
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
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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've skimmed plenty of the below comments and they all seem to agree that this anti-google guy is a goofball.
:-}). If you read the Salon article with a critical eye, you'll see an article slamming someone who actually made a fairly logical and reasonably thought-out complaint about the PageRank system, carefully interspacing comments about his counterculture past with his simple belief that the "democractic" nature of PageRank isn't democratic at all. With wink of the eye comments like "(using the royal "we")" make it very clear what the bias of the author is: Disparage this guy no matter what. They went so far as to make claims on behalf of him (which I can't see in his article), such as "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."" : Funny, but I don't see that in his paper, but instead that appears to be Salon making some rhetorical exaggerations to push his opinion to extremes.
This whole bizarre Salon article and the followup Slashdot postings seems like a horrible, reprehensible character assassination because someone said something that someone else didn't like (is it too late, and Google has gotten too powerful
The bizarrest thing is how quickly everyone hopped on the bandwagon to slam this "kook", all based upon the carefully manipulative wording of a Salon article. It is especially disconcerting given that this is the type of guy (questioning "the establishment") that the Slashdot crowd usually hoists on their shoulders and casts as their hero. This Salon article is DISPICABLE, and the methods that the author uses to villainize this guy is a study in evasive techniques (Google's cookie and search tracking doesn't matter, you see, because there are sites that are worse).
Or use Proxomitron to change all cookies to session cookies, if a cookie is needed. Otherwise, let Cookie Cop or Proxomitron block 'em. (Cookie Cop's interface makes it a bit easier, so I run Cookie Cop behinf Proxomitron. I really ought to reverse the order though.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Saying that criticism is not information, it is jut opinion, is ridiculous. Everything we say is opinion until we can prove it, and the only way to prove criticism against a company or government is through law or through having your criticism confirmed by the recipient, at which point it becomes information. So unless companies and governments suddenly decide to own up to all of their improprietries, or there is an international framework with which to bring governments and companies to account, criticism will always just be opinion, and there won't ever be any scope for independent information.
Now how else will you keep companies honest? I'd love to see the faces in the Shell boardroom if you went in and told them in a very stern face to be honest, so that we all have perfect information and a perfect free market (a pipedream if ever there was one) and can all live as happily as your textbooks suggest.
Meanwhile, entering "Michael Jordan" in vivisimo gets me: sports, NBA, Posters, Pictures, Bulls-Chicago, Air, Tribute, Space Jam, Shoes... the list goes on and on, but no computer science. Even using "NOT basketball" still brings up basketball references exclusively .
Putting "computer scientists" in vivisimo, I get: research, engineers, interest, American, mathematics, study, issue, history, memory, life, and "more." None of these give me any indication that they hold information about anyone named Michael Jordan. Even clicking a few levels deeper on the directories didn't do it.
So the score is: Google getting it on the first try vs. vivisimo never finding it. We should all be "doomed" like that.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
"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."
To me, that doesn't seem like 'democratic'. It seems more like a 'whatever fights the establishment!' engine.
I like the fact that Google doesn't do that - if I'm searching for "United Airlines", there's a damn good chance I wanted to find United's website. If I search for "United Airlines Bad Experiences", then I'd want untied.com.
Brandt just wants a search engine that everyone uses, but censors its results according to his political philosophy. He's just as much of a facist as he's trying to say they are.
-T
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Google does have a monopoly on search engines
... if they're as good as he (and apparently you) seem to think, he'll have no problem usurping Google as the #1 search engine on the internet.
No, it doesn't. How about Alta-vista? Lycos? Hell, go to dogpile.com, and do a search there, and see all of the search engines that are used. This is NOT a monopoly, in any sense of the word.
I think, he is trying to call a revision to Google to develop more 'pagerank' innovations
Well then, if he's so smart, why doesn't he write his own 'innovations'?
But instead, he whines to some rag about how "unfairly" he's being treated.
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
Brandt mentioned how all your search terms are saved in google's cookie for 36 years. ... I looked at the cookie, and there's nothing indicating my search terms are in there.
There doesn't have to be; they could be using the cookie as an index in a server-side DB.
I primarily use Google Toolbar, and I reguarly do a Clear Search History. Is that good enough to wipe out the searches?
Probably not (IIRC, search history local only). If you're worried, the best thing to do is reject cookies, or prevent them from being stored on your local drive (if you use a browser that doesn't do this, a quick hack is to make your cookies file read-only, so they're not stored between browser sessions.)
If you believe the e-mail I get in my hotmail account I have a number of valuable and unique links, want some?
Though this guy is clearly a case of very very sour grapes, he does have a point. I'm not saying that his crappy page should be ranked higher on Google. As people who've been to his page and searched for Richard Nixon have noted, his page doesn't even display relevant information about Richard Nixon.
/. for technical news, it will probably take a long time for it to be ranked above /. on Google, even though its superior. Why? Because people can't link to what people can't see.
Some interesting points, however, are that Google's page ranking system will discriminate against newer websites, and will favor commercial websites over non-commercial ones. Regarding discrimination against new sites, this partially makes sense. Why should a site just created yesterday have equal footage with one's that have been around for years? Sites should have to be proven.
However, there is a rather unfortunate catch 21 here, in that in order for a site to be proven as an "important site" to Google, it must be seen by searchers and linked to. The odds of that are slim if a site is ranked lowly. This means that if a new site comes up which is superior to
As a solution for this catch-22, I propose that Google have two additional "shaded boxes" underneath the "sponsors" boxes: one for random sites, and another one for "up and coming sites". This allows sites which are up and coming to climb to their rightful place, and gives sites a chance to be recognized.
Furthermore, I suggest that Google's ranking system be revised. Ranking pages partially by link-to's is a good idea. But ultimately, the best thing is to rank based on user opinion, which means sites ranked higher by Google's users would show up earlier in searches.
As for commercial sites being ranked higher than non-commercial one's, I think that's where Google's link-based ranking results are flawed. Corporate sites will have more links to them by "more important" sites than Non-Corporate sites, even if they aren't as good. This is a problem that needs to be solved.
As for this particular whiner, its obvious he just has a case of sour grapes. He wants his website on Rumpsfeld to come up before the official government website? Please. Earth to whiner, earth to whiner: your site isn't that good.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I just deleted Google's cookie in Mozilla 1, refreshed the front page of Google, checked the cookies store.... and a cookie is set, you don't need to go into prefs or anything.
= 0939ICPJpYE .google.com /
Cookie Info:
Name : PREF
Information : ID=0b2f3d9f6ec97b17:TM=1030664178:LM=1030664178:S
Domain :
Path :
Server Secure : No
Expires : Monday, January 18, 2038 06:14:00
.... and do I care? um.... no?
----- One piece short of Legoland
No, comments aren't really the major part of slashdot.
Did you read Rob Malda's comments about the subscription system? Most readers of this site never even read comments, let alone make them.
my fault, I failed to notice that I had "accept all cookies from this domain" set in Konqueror so I was never prompted to accept a cookie.
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Google wraps all links with a javascript function and a redirect script so they know exactly which links you are clicking, how long you spend on a results page, etc.
/ ww w.junkbusters.com/&e=42
& q=(.*)\& e=.*>/$1/ig
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http:/
Is an example of the target they insert in every result page link.
This regex:
s/<a.*href.*http:\/\/www\.google\.ca\/.*\
Is privoxy will strip them from the page. I prefer to not have my browsing so closely scrutinized, although I do not strip their text advertising (which I find useful and non-offensive).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Huh? Show me where it says in the Constitution where you have a right to make someone buy your ads.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
namebase.org is now slashdotted. I would be able to view it via the Google cache, but some brilliant webmaster specified that the Googlebot should not archive the site.
Thanks, Daniel Brandt! You've prevented me from reading your own site!
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
I do ok competing against the book pages of the New York Times, etc. (though I'm currently behind the Boston Globe on a search for "book reviews").
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
You're saying Google doesn't return relevant results?
Yes, congratulations, you've yet again expounded some theories from your economics classes, but you're still ignoring reality. Do you think we have a free market today, by the textbook definition? If you do, perhaps you should look again. Regulation is everywhere, and economists (nobel winners among them) have long recognised the need for light regulation and for a framework by which badly behaving regulators and companies can be brought to account, and countries and companies in trouble can, where appropriate, be rescued.
Look what happened in South East Asia when the government looked the other way and the market was left wide open - too much speculative investment, greed, and a government not yet sophisticated enough to handle such a sophisticated economy brought about one of the biggest economic collapses of the 20th century.
As for your assertion that any kind of planning is comparable with the North Korean, Chinese and Soviet Russian interpretations of communism, that just shows that you've probably studied no more economics than was in your holy "economics 101" course. What other solutions do you propose to solve the many urgent problems our planet faces, such as the massive over-consumption of the West, the huge human problems in developing nations caused by the massively unequal distribution of wealth, and the abuse of power on the behalf of governments, corporations and individuals that are exacerbating all of this? And if you say the free market, then I'll quit now and apologise that I have no answers that you will find in your textbook.
Where did I get the attitude that corporations are evil and dishonest? Well, not *all* of them are, but if you try doing a little research, you will find a LONG, LONG list of abuses of money and power on the behalf of corporations. If I were to say this about governments, you probably wouldn't disagree, so I don't see why you then assume some blind faith in corporations. Any organisation is able to abusee its power. The point is to balance the power of the state, the private sector, and the public at large. If left to their own devices, with no input from the state or the public, the private sector becomes just as malicious a regulator as the state. For a period we put too much faith in the state, until the problems were blown wide open. Now we put too much faith in the private sector, and the problems are all too obvious for those willing to look.
And no, if you must know I'm a capitalist of the Green persuasion, and I disagree with many of the ideas of Karl Marx and of the communists, socialists, anarchists and even many greens that have followed. I also happen to disagree with a lot of the neo-liberal free market bilge you spout.
And PLEASE... Adam Smith and Karl Marx are as hopelessly out of date as your ideas are simplistic.
They're no longer unblocked . .
hawk
Since when is this a right wing behavior? Does the left really use it any less than the right?
For that matter, those of us on the classic liberal up use it as well (especially the extremists known as "libertarian") . .
For that matter, it's tough to find anyone who used it as much as the laregly defunct down (Bolsheviks, etc. .
hawk
>preferences such as their search language,
>SafeSearch settings, the number of results per
>page, etc.
YEs, they *could*. Realizing that, I let theirs through. With or without proxies, on netscape and mozilla, I have yet to see a preference saved . .
hawk