Slashdot Mirror
Does Google = God?
lgreco writes "In an op/ed for the NYT, Thomas Friedman wonders "Is Google God?" Interesting article that disseminates things mostly known to and hopefully well understood by the Slashdot readership. The fact that such commentary made it to the NYT op/ed pages is remarkable." It's the NYT, so a free registration is required.
A co-worker of mine has been claiming that google is god for two years now.
religion changes...
And if now we use the "GooglePower" to find some information remember when we used altavista or metacrawler.
There is also more and more fake hits on google.
Sometimes you have to browse 2-3 pages of results before finding a real result.
Because everybody is using the power of google to raise up is site.
Because a site that's not in google will never be seen...
But the google bot are really powerfull, thay can even read in any file format. They will propably find once: "What is the Matrix..."
After reading this article I was quite disappointed. As has been said earlier it appears to be a fluff piece talking mostly about Wi-Fi followed by using google to find anything anywhere.
If I was a more suspicious person (or paranoid) I would think this was really an veiled attempt to scare people into being afraid of the big-bad Internat and its ability to link like minded people of various hatreds to each other in ways not before seen. Want to get permission to crack down on free-speach on the Internet? Articles like this will "encourage" people to think that's what is going to happen. After all, heaven forbid that Osama's recruiting video may be streamed on the Internet and it (according to the author) is very motivating.
Sounds like "Internet breads terrorism, we should all be afraid". Just what is needed before "we need to control what's on the internet to protect everyong" starts being said.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I just thought it was interesting that google is tracking slashdot articles in the same way as cnn and nyt.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
...It's always interesting to see which of the science-fiction concepts of my youth have actually come to pass. Moon travel came to pass, but certainly not the way Heinlein or H. G. Wells or Jules Verne imagined it.
In the sixties and early seventies, people were awed but poorly informed about computers. The commonest question that "lay" friends and relatives would ask me is "But what do you DO with a computer? Do you ask it questions?" That seemed bizarrely naive to me, and I would try to explain that it was more like playing with an electric train set, and that, outside of jokes, or Asimov's "Multivac" stories, you didn't "ask questions" of a computer.
Well, Google may not be Multivac, but it sure is a lot more like Multivac than H. G. Well's space gun or Cavorite sphere is like Project Apollo. You don't normally phrase the questions as questions, and it doesn't provide interpretative, English-language "answers," but it certainly is an awesome and it may not be omniscient but it's an order of magnitude more "scient" than anything else I've seen.
And, yes, it FINALLY looks as if "flat TV you can hang on a wall" is not only here, but I expect I'll be buying one within the next five years or so.
No helicars or voice typewriters yet, though.
(No, ViaVoice is NOT a good realization of the "voicewriter" fantasy. Oh, and for the record, to me, "Ask Jeeves" does NOT feel like Multivac at all, but Google does. I can't say why, that's just the way it strikes me.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually I prefer to think about Google, or the web in general, as the hitchikers guide to galaxy as described in Douglas Adams novels. It knows about anything but most of the time the answer might not quite be what you were looking for.
cu,
Lispy
Well, his words certainly shows how he feels - "the USA is drifting further away from the real world", and what does that really mean, that this new God is going to help the evils (these days that's everybody other than the Americans, the US itself is never evil) against the USA, and so they should control it. How apt, he's saying America should control not only technology, but "God" himself.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.
The point is more fear and paranoiac fantasies as only Thomas Friedman can spin, with an evil-doer under every rock, a terrorist behind every tree and, now, a rabid, sweaty-toothed madman coming to get us behind every keyboard.
From his lofty perch high atop the NY Times, Friedman has seen a career revival thanks to 9/11, winning a Pulitzer for his turgid writing about the event and its effects. When Friedman gets basic facts just plain wrong, it makes you wonder how much else he gets wrong, or otherwise intentionally distorts or misrepresents just so he can make everyone see the world through his lens where terrorists will get all of us.
Examples?
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure...
and
A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net
Really? The last time I checked VeriSign was only responsible for maintaining the .com and .net registries, as well as most SSL certificate services. There are 243 country code top-level domains, plus the .org TLD, not just .com and .net. The way Friedman makes it sound it's as if there's nothing else out there, and I'm not sure which is worse: that he was too lazy or too apathetic to talk to anyone other than VeriSign to get a basic understanding of the Internet to accurately write about it for his many non-technical readers.
These are basic facts and are simple to check. Any journalism student can do this so why doesn't Friedman?
Given his penchant for hyperbole in overstating the negative consequences of everything and minimizing the positives, it's no surprise that Friedman has completely missed the fact that the same technologies he fears are just as capable of opening up communications. He says that while the world is growing more integrated and what the world thinks about the USA will matter more, the USA is becoming ideologically isolationist and it doesn't need to heed what the rest of the world tells it. Proliferation of the Internet facilitates the free exchange of ideas that can result in better understanding and relations with the rest of the world, which Friedman apparently believes is full of nothing but some sort of irrational monolithic hatred.
When Friedman takes such a reductionist view of the world that amounts to Us vs. Them, is it any wonder that all Friedman can see are terrorists, terrorists everywhere and not a refuge in sight.
When the only tool you have is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.
What a goofy term. The answer is necessarily yes and no at the same time because God means something different to everyone.
To me, God is a name for entropy, the thing that makes life random, though only because we cannot detect and account for it in a meaningful fashion, in most cases. The devil is in the details, and it don't get any more detailed than entropy. Mind you, I think the Devil and God are just different sides of the same thing; entropy that hurts you, and entropy that works in your favor.
Google is the opposite of entropy. It helps us bring order to chaos. It's a really good automatically generated index (while Yahoo and DMOZ and similar sites are tables of contents) and nothing more.
Now if you want to get into a more metaphysical discussion, google helps make us more than we are because knowledge is power but only if you can get your hands on it and use it. Google puts more information at our fingertips. Someday when we're communicating with our computer implants via thought (or perhaps subvocalization, at least sooner than thought) it's going to be an indexing system (or several of them) that lets us make concise queries and get a relevant answer back, just as it is today, and that certainly seems godlike. Imagine being stuck in bumfuck nowhere and being able to just sort of ask the air what to do. Talk about talking to god. Of course, you're just accessing a network, but what is God anyway? Which just brings us back to how silly the name of the article is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AllTheWeb indexes more documents.
Microsoft has decided to compete with Google.
Yes Google is a cool search engine, but come on folks, you get the same top ten results from even the weakest sites.
Thomas Friedman has it right with his main point, that what others think of us, and the ability of others to communicate, matters more--put simply, as the six British soldiers found when they died by mob the other day, all the military might in the world is not going to matter when billions decide to overrun Europe from Africa, Russia from China, and the US from south of the border. Goggle is good and getting better, but here are two reasons why it is a bishop at best: 1) Google technical people (disclosure, they blew off the ideas at oss.net) are enamoured of their original algorithms and not willing to take on the micro-cash, copyright, and audit issues associated with googleizing privately owned information that can then be accessed a la carte in both moderated and unmoderated form, on a cash and carry basis; and 2) they don't seem to be focused on the importance of getting a solid partnership going with the various language translations softwares that Bill Gates is "shutting out" of cyberspace. There are a whole range of concepts from the US intelligence community (which is half brilliant, half village idiot, its the brilliant part we want Google to think about) that could indeed allow Google to become the information merchant bank and true information commons for the world. They do great with what is there now--my estimate is that they will never be more than a 20% solution unless they set some standards, adopt multi-level security algorithms that allow the sharing of government secret and corporation confidential information, and get serious about language translation.
google is good = about 1,820,000 results
google is a search engine = about 1,630,000 results
google sucks = about 137,000 results
google is Shiva = about 9,440 results
google is a tuna fish sandwich = about 851
Somewhat circular, but that aside, I think Google's nature is reasonably clear.
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