Google Makes Its Search System Slightly More Transparent

Meshach writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about how Google has revealed some of the inner workings of the Google Search service. The main change is that sites that are not in English will be translated then included in the search results. Google said it has also improved the way it recognizes official Web sites, like those published by the government, and will give those sites higher ranking in search results. Google does not usually reveal such details but the article speculates governments have been pushing for more transparancy."

Comments

Re:What!

[Fluffeh]

While the government may "get the job done" as you say, I really think it is merely a matter of having the biggest budget to throw at a problem and getting the worst possible job done. Not saying that it is like this in every single case, but a lot of the time when I look at large government projects, they are bloated badly, implemented poorly and there are many obvious improvements possible that could have saved money or made a better solution - had the right person been there to say "Yes" or "No" rather than a "Project Manager" who knows how to use visio and project manager.

While I am in Sydney, here are two comparable examples: The M7 is a four to six lane motorway that was built completely from scratch. It is around 40 kilometers long (25 miles?). This included around 90 bridges so as to not interrupt current roads (The road sometimes goes over existing roads, other times, bridges were built over the motorway). The road was built in three years, came in six months ahead of schedule and cost around $1.8 billion.

Now, another major road project is the F5 widening. The project started in 2005 and is still running. While I have searched for a total cost, I can only find the cost of the current stage, which has cost $138 million to widen a single section of this project.

A private contractor could have done this much quicker (just ask anyone living in south western Sydney) and better and probably for a lot less money. While a government may "get it done" it's not the best or cheapest option the vast majority of the time.