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The Googlewashing Of Our Language

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the english-evolution dept.

KIondike writes "The Register talks about how a term ("Second Superpower") coined by the anti-war culture suddenly got radically neutered and altered by a weblog that a lot of people link to. Searching for the term on Google now brings up his blog and other people talking about his blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused and perverted? This only took 42 days." First the widespread usage of "googling" to mean web searching, and now this.

4 of 512 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Am I the only one... by Tailhook · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Not that polling has any great claim on credibility, but according to polls from before the start of hostilities, Americans supported this action. Since the start support has increased dramatically, but the actions of the US been supported by the majority throughout. This runs counter to your assertion that "the vast majority of people just gave up." Perhaps you meant the vast majority of anti-war folks. The truth is anti-war people were before, are now, and will continue to be the minority in the US. Regardless of how vocal they think they are.

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  2. Re:I love the google* words. by Catnapster · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The link to the search was the funniest thing I've seen in weeks. Mod this guy up.

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    The world can be wrong today for once.
  3. Re:I love the google* words. by unitron · · Score: 1, Redundant
    Well, let's see, the first definition of 'second superpower' was 'huge anti-war demonstrations', and the second was 'worldwide peace campaign'. Those might not be two different ways of talking about the same thing but it's not blindingly obvious.

    Google is neither a dictionary nor an encyclopaedia. It doesn't tell you what your search terms mean, it shows you who else is talking about them.

    Why should there be a single, fixed definition of 'second superpower' when you won't find universal agreement on the meaning of 'superpower'? The best you can hope for is an indication of the relative percentages of the various opinions.

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    I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  4. I never promised you a Rose Garden by skillet-thief · · Score: 1, Redundant
    A few dozen netarati with popular blogs can make the original hard news article that coined the term to be dropped from the first page of the search results. This is in fact proof that google sometimes doesn't work.

    Nobody ever promised us that Google would be an accurate representation of society, of the language, or anything else. It's just a way of finding stuff on the internet.

    We have started giving Google these almost God-like qualities. Google is still "working" just fine. It might turn out that it is not a sure source of universal wisdom, however.

    It's a search engine. Get over it.

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    Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire