[tmbchr]™

Google Losing Out To Wikipedia As Leading Information Source



How’s that for an attention grabbing headline. We have to begin communicating more effectively: this means on the level of email titles, link texts for pingbacks, the headline only which appears in someone’s RSS feed now. People won’t scan your whole post but you can be guaranteed they will see at least the title. Tell your story on all levels.

Now that that lesson is over, think about the original issue at hand and forget all about that: when you do a Google search, tell me how much of the content that is returned is RSS pull-through reprint trash™ and other forms of scraped content?

Google is losing ground because their search results are corrupted by their own ad systems being gamed by spammers who are skewing language and content to blossom only around keywords with money behind them. LANGUAGE ITSELF FOR SALE.

They better fix this shit.

Wikipedia is already the first and usually only relevant search result for most simple topical searches for me right now. The only thing Google is good for really anymore is researching quotes and odd pairings of phrases (scrambling). Wikipedia itself is highly politicized around the control of its content, but that process is mostly transparent: you get to see when it was changed, sometimes who changed it, and talk about why.

All we have of the Truth is the truth of our process to attain it. That is enough.







3 Reader Responses

  1. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    Google acquires Postini:

    With Postini Solutions, you can secure all of your electronic communications - email, instant messaging and the web – and manage your company’s communication policies from one central location. Postini Solutions can also make it easy to meet your archiving and encryption needs.

    One of Postini’s “brand promises” is to “stop bot-nets”… Google themselves seem to be severely lagging in that regard, but I doubt that’s why they bought Postini:

    Best of all, it’s all 100% hosted, so there’s no hardware or software to install or maintain.

    In other words, it is completely centrally controlled!

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006...07/03/centrally-networked-life-forms/
    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...7/unnecessary-network-centralization/
    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...es-call-for-global-privacy-standards/

  2. Human Search Agents - To[p oBcultu]re Says:
    October 29th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    […] Depending on how you phrase complex questions like that, you may be able to just Google it and find a half dozen pages with relevant information which you can skim through and find approximate answers to your questions. But really, you shouldn’t have to go through all that bullshit. We *should* be able to build algorithms which can skim and digest information for you and deliver it in a quick human-readable format. And yet we don’t. The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, actually. And when you get down to it, the information it returns is often a hell of a lot more valuable for a preliminary search than Google’s results. And Wikipedia is written and maintained by humans. Go figure! Read Similar Articles: […]

  3. Open And Closed Control of Meaning - To[p oBcultu]re Says:
    October 29th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    […] Reason #567 why Wikipedia is better than Google: Wikipedia itself is highly politicized around the control of its content, but that process is mostly transparent: you get to see when it was changed, sometimes who changed it, and talk about why. […]



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