Wednesday, March 10, 2010
IT’S the word of the century so far. Just when the search engine launched back in 1998 became a verb — "to google" — no one quite knows, but many of us google something, anything, dozens of times a day.
Apparently, officially, Stephen Gately was the most searched for term last year in Ireland, but the suspicion is that words like "sex", "porn" and "hangover" feature highly, as do the names of some of its rivals such as Facebook (privately owned) and Hotmail (owned by Microsoft).
Whether it’s Google — and they do have around 80% of the market — or another search term, we have come to rely on them.
If you’re a serious internet user, imagine a world without search engines for a second. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
But, recently, questions have been raised. Search engines might be speedy but are they precise enough, for instance? Type in "moss" and your results would range from the socialite model to the green stuff that clings to rocks.
Similarly, type in "windows" and the search would show the software and the panes you look out of. We knew what we meant when we typed it in but, for all the fancy algorithms, no search engine is a mind-reader.
The ability to divine the user’s intent is what separates a good search engine from a bad one and now they preempt us by suggesting keyword combinations that could fetch the best results. As time goes on, the market leaders will come closer and closer, more often than not, to whatever that random thought was in each of our heads which we wanted some more detail or clarity on.
Since Google, Bing and the rest don’t charge us directly, they’re coming to be seen more and more as virtual public services. Whether that makes the web a democracy, though, is another matter. Content that has been deemed popular by Google, et al, becomes more popular because users are more likely to encounter it; less popular web content languishes in obscurity. Just about anyone with a computer and a connection can publish web content: insofar as there is democracy on the web, that’s it.
What search engines do, and do very well, is help you to sift through that mass of unedited content, to find whatever it is you’re interested in. Google does this by making the perfectly reasonable assumption that your interests have something in common with those of other people.
Is that dumbing down or is it really just a whinge from people whose opinions are not as popular as they would like them to be — as if the court of public opinion is somehow inadequate as a test of one’s ideas. On the contrary, it is incumbent upon people with ideas to communicate them clearly and to convince others of them; it is not the responsibility of search engines to keep ideas pure, an Orwellian notion if there ever was one.
But if much of the criticism of search engines, and Google in particular, is misguided, not to mention cranky, many of us are beginning to wonder where it will all end. Soon Google Streetview will be upon us. If the experience in other countries is anything to go by, unsuspecting people will have been caught by Google’s car-mounted cameras doing things they’d rather the world didn’t know about.
Of more lasting significance perhaps will be the fate of Google Books. The company’s hopes of creating the world’s largest digital library remain uncertain after a New York district court declared it needed more time to rule on the controversial project.
Announced in 2004, the $200 million enterprise began by scanning and digitising the entire libraries of four major universities. In return for permission to digitise the collections of these universities, including Oxford, they were promised a digital copy of the books and journals. The case, which has major implications for copyright law, has been caught in a legal quagmire since 2005 with Google contesting that the use of "excerpts" is exempted.
Authors, publishers, libraries and Google have been to-ing and fro-ing for years as attempts have been made to find an equitable agreement. On the one hand, the potential exists for a genuine knowledge revolution. Millions of out-of-print materials could suddenly become available at the end of a few mouse clicks in an enormous searchable database. Public access to books will be vastly improved.
But at what cost? Google acquiring a monopoly over a vast digital library for one, giving it the ability to set prices and business models. Certainly the issues seem rather too subtle for a court to decide upon adequately.
And if Google succeeds in rewriting a major area of copyright law through its proposed settlement, are we opening a Pandora’s box and will someone else try something similar for music or photographs? Will any aspect of our very beings really belong to us anymore?
One of the major points at issue is that of so-called orphan books, those millions of books for which the copyright-holder is unknown. This is Google’s real potential cash cow unless these "parents" can be identified. Certainly, Google would prefer an opt-out rather than an opt-in approach, leaving the onus on these holders to come forward rather than have to be found.
There are some privacy issues at stake as well, although some Americans, it must be said, take a rather more extreme view on this than we do: we’re rather blasé about being tracked in our everyday lives so someone knowing which book we have consulted is not a front-of-mind concern. Furthermore, Google could gain a competitive advantage, potentially bolstering the power of its search using the contents of millions of out-of-print books — although, in fairness, other companies are free to make similar investments.
SO is Google, on balance, a good guy trying to open up a horde of knowledge that is hidden from current view, or is it blatantly trying to lock up intellectual property? The answer, of course, is that it is a bit of both.
But as the demise of Hughes & Hughes from the main street, if not the airports, shows, the book industry here, as well as internationally, is in serious trouble. True, there are more factors than just the internet to blame — exchange rates and falling demand in a recession being just two — but is the digital book really any kind of substitute for the real thing?
Will we manage to inculcate a love of digital books in children when the temptation to surf elsewhere is so strong if they are in front of the computer? I wonder.
Google and its ilk are classic frenemies, indispensible within limits.
The Google Story, a real book made of dead trees by David A Vise, makes a fascinating read: how a tiny business that began in a garage turned into a media colossus. But if you don’t like what it does, who do you write and complain to?
Cute graphics cannot disguise that it’s a business like any other. Love it or hate it, no doubt it will give us plenty to talk about whenever it launches its next big venture.
Apparently it’s superfast broadband — I googled it.
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