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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."
And I think the Us Monetary system is unfair because I dont have enough of it!!!
No I didnt spell check this post...
a few links will fix namebase's spot on the list
...he'd increase his page ranking on google if he removed the little tin foil hats from his servers.
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.
Upon reading the article, you find that Mr. Brandt's main complaint about Google is that he believes that when you type in, say, "Richard M. Nixon" into Google, the material he has compiled on Nixon should be ranked #1.
Okay, so I did a search on Nixon on Brandt's site. Here are the first couple of results:
(1) How the Vatican conspired to hide Nazi war criminals.
(2) How various activists were persecuted by the CIA and FBI.
Nowhere did I even SEE Nixon's name in these abstracts. The only relevance is that Nixon was alive at the time, or maybe president when some of them took place, but hardly the man personally responsible for all of them.
When I type "Nixon" into Google, I expect to see biographical material, both good and bad, not totally unrelated rantings. Google is doing its job, in my opinion. It is giving low rankings to Brandt's irrelevant materials. His complaints are pure self-centered sour grapes.
This guy's just whining because Google doesn't rank pages according to his crackheaded counterculture views? And this is news?
Google must be doing pretty well if this is the worst criticism they can find about them.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how is this a violation of your privacy? I mean, the whole thing is that you are using their service for free and willfully sending them the data that you choose. Everyone gets to choose what they search for in a search engine. This isn't private information in any real way. Google is providing you the free service of looking up words that you have intentionally provided. You don't like them being associated with a cookie? Refuse the damn cookie! Really paranoid? Go wander the web on your own without a search engine!
At what point were you guaranteed the free and anonymous use of a search engine? You're not being forced to use it. The world doesn't discriminate against people who do not choose not to efficiently search the web.
People like this are blurring the privacy issue and focusing attention away from legitimate privacy issues.
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
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.
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
Well, you could have submitted a link to the freakin' article instead of just a URL for it.
Soon to be announced: Google for Wackos! With a clean-cut, cookie-less interface free of CIA influence, Google for Wackos will return search results based not on the listed sites' popularity, but on the wackiness of the conspiracy theories they present. Most popular search terms include Zapruder, tin foil, UFOs, and of course sex (but only the dirty illegal kind that politicians have.)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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
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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.