| Elsewhere on the Tree we've been discussing Google, on and off. Two analogies I've been thinking about. Maybe someone else has posted about this.
1. Just as biodiversity is good for an ecosystem, having a lot of search alternatives is healthier than having just one. Practices such as googlebombing emerge because people figure out the weaknesses of the system. Eventually the system becomes unreliable, diseased, because too many people know how to exploit it in ways it wasn't meant to be used. If there are no alternatives remaining when it rots, the ecosystem (Web) as a whole suffers.
2. Google is like the Interstate highway system. Towns on older roads decay and shrivel up because everyone starts building to catch passing traffic on the superhighways. Weblogging, with its heavy dependence on the link-and-constant-update-loving Google, is like Motel 6 and the Olive Garden. Yet just as those clusters of Interstate franchises will be collecting tumbleweeds when the oil economy winds down, many webloggers now furiously linking to each other to "up their ratings" will be history when, say, Google is wrecked by greedy shareholders after it goes public. And there'll be no "old growth" community to fall back on, because static websites will have packed it in for lack of hits (see #1 above). These are meant to be words of caution, not pessimism. Just use Dogpile once in a while.
shriveled up towns provide cheap real estate
Yeah--if you're planning to buy a dot-com.
teoma is a new search engine getting a lot of press today. It's not really new. I mentioned in on 7.24.01, but it is being re-launched after being bought out and retooled for the past many months. I think it is somebody from Rutgers, so maybe Linda knows something about it.
Anyway, I tried a few test searches and wasn't completely blown away. Probably I'll try some more.
Google did sort of let me down with the whole scientology issue, but I'm still firmly behind them. If they ever do go over to the dark side then we'll just build something else. It's such an interesting problem that I think there will always be very smart geeks itching to tackle it. Nobody is trying too hard right now just because google is so good. But you'd see action in this space very quickly if that wasn't the case. I'm not sure supporting second rate search engines is really going to help things very much.
The completely killer thing about google is that they cache everything! Can you imagine? This is what got them into trouble with the scientologists (who could argue that they are an ISP because of the cache and then hit them with the DMCA.) Nobody else is going to do this while google is already doing it. It's just too big a job, and google has too much of a head start. But if they slip up somebody else will step in.
In general I agree with the bio-diversity angle, except it's not always good for large scale technology projects. If there were competing space programs would we have gotten to the moon faster? Some things are so big that it makes sense to put all your eggs in one basket. Maybe.
There were competing space programs! Us and the Russkies. We'd never have gotten there by '69 if people didn't think it was a war. But of course, in the states it was one massive military-industrial push.
On google caches: I thought those expired. Often when I click on them nothing comes up.
I agree Dogpile's second rate. I was just trying to be charitable (at the expense of common sense).
Google explains its' patented pagerank technology.
|
1. Just as biodiversity is good for an ecosystem, having a lot of search alternatives is healthier than having just one. Practices such as googlebombing emerge because people figure out the weaknesses of the system. Eventually the system becomes unreliable, diseased, because too many people know how to exploit it in ways it wasn't meant to be used. If there are no alternatives remaining when it rots, the ecosystem (Web) as a whole suffers.
2. Google is like the Interstate highway system. Towns on older roads decay and shrivel up because everyone starts building to catch passing traffic on the superhighways. Weblogging, with its heavy dependence on the link-and-constant-update-loving Google, is like Motel 6 and the Olive Garden. Yet just as those clusters of Interstate franchises will be collecting tumbleweeds when the oil economy winds down, many webloggers now furiously linking to each other to "up their ratings" will be history when, say, Google is wrecked by greedy shareholders after it goes public. And there'll be no "old growth" community to fall back on, because static websites will have packed it in for lack of hits (see #1 above).
These are meant to be words of caution, not pessimism. Just use Dogpile once in a while.
- tom moody 3-29-2002 4:40 am
shriveled up towns provide cheap real estate
- Skinny 3-29-2002 11:48 am [add a comment]
Yeah--if you're planning to buy a dot-com.
- tom moody 3-31-2002 3:54 am [add a comment]
teoma is a new search engine getting a lot of press today. It's not really new. I mentioned in on 7.24.01, but it is being re-launched after being bought out and retooled for the past many months. I think it is somebody from Rutgers, so maybe Linda knows something about it.
Anyway, I tried a few test searches and wasn't completely blown away. Probably I'll try some more.
Google did sort of let me down with the whole scientology issue, but I'm still firmly behind them. If they ever do go over to the dark side then we'll just build something else. It's such an interesting problem that I think there will always be very smart geeks itching to tackle it. Nobody is trying too hard right now just because google is so good. But you'd see action in this space very quickly if that wasn't the case. I'm not sure supporting second rate search engines is really going to help things very much.
The completely killer thing about google is that they cache everything! Can you imagine? This is what got them into trouble with the scientologists (who could argue that they are an ISP because of the cache and then hit them with the DMCA.) Nobody else is going to do this while google is already doing it. It's just too big a job, and google has too much of a head start. But if they slip up somebody else will step in.
In general I agree with the bio-diversity angle, except it's not always good for large scale technology projects. If there were competing space programs would we have gotten to the moon faster? Some things are so big that it makes sense to put all your eggs in one basket. Maybe.
- jim 4-01-2002 5:22 pm [add a comment]
There were competing space programs! Us and the Russkies. We'd never have gotten there by '69 if people didn't think it was a war. But of course, in the states it was one massive military-industrial push.
On google caches: I thought those expired. Often when I click on them nothing comes up.
I agree Dogpile's second rate. I was just trying to be charitable (at the expense of common sense).
- tom moody 4-01-2002 5:29 pm [add a comment]
Google explains its' patented pagerank technology.
- jim 4-02-2002 2:26 am [add a comment]