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Something
to think about... About Google...
(Adapted from an article by Lee Dembart that appeared in the International
Herald Tribune (March 24, 2003).
“Google has become the indispensable tool for anyone using the Internet.
It offers the most complete, and usually the best-targeted responses to
searches on the Web. It gets about 200 million inquiries per day from
around the world. This has given it a certain monopoly over information
on the Internet.
But the question remains: Is anyone worried about the fact that one company
determines how information is served up?
Google went online in 1998 and has become the preeminent search engine
because it scours the Net for the best sites. “Best” is defined by ones
that have the most links to them, reasoning that if a lot of people go
to the site, then it probably meets the needs of most people as well.
Google’s ranking of sites is a closely held secret. Before that, searches
matched terms and words in a mechanical way that displayed almost laughable
results. Google finds relevance instead. Few people actually go beyond
the first few results that they get, so the first few are the most crucial.
Google is not without its critics. Daniel Brandt, who runs a site called
www.google-watch.org,
says that not everything can be fixed by algorithm and using Web crawlers
and he finds that Google does not go deep enough into every single database
on the Internet.
Another potential problem is privacy. Google deposits cookies on your
computer that keeps track of the search you are looking for. This personal
information may be used later in advertising and in profiling – creating
legal issues of invasion of privacy.
So what is the solution? For the time being, and until something else
takes over, people will continue Googling.
Did we not go through the same thing with Yahoo!??
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