Search engine bias?

I notice that "Measuring bias in 'organic' Web search" by Edelman and Lockwood, is simply "posted" on a Website (http://www.benedelman.org/searchbias/), rather than being a peer-reviewed paper, so I'm not sure why anyone is paying it any attention. The authors suggest that Google is biased on the basis of what is probably the most trivial bit of data collection one could imagine.  It's easy to replicate.  One search term they used was "mail" and, sure enough, when I use this in Google, the first item retrieved is a link to Gmail.  However, when I use email - presumably equally likely to be used by searchers, the first item is a link to Hotmail and the second is to Gmail; when I use "e-mail", the first link is to Yahoo's mail service, the second is to Wikipedia, the third is to Hotmail, the  fourth is to news on e-mail and only the fifth is to Gmail.


In other words, to base a proposition of bias on one possible form of a concept is to write absolute rubbish.  Still, these are Harvard Business School people and no doubt self-advertisement is the primary motivation here.

Google in trouble again

I see that Google is in trouble again with its Street View activities. The BBC News reports:

The Australian police have been ordered to investigate Google for possible breach of privacy while taking pictures for its Street View service.

Australia's attorney general said he had asked police to probe the internet giant following complaints that Google had gathered personal data from some unencrypted wi-fi services.
Google has admitted doing so, but apologised, saying it was in error.

Openness and Google

There's an interesting item on openness on the Google blog - but before everyone gets excited, note that it is about openness in two contexts: open systems and software and openness about the information Google collects about us. It's not about any plans Google may have towards open access to the information it stores. I think we can expect the controversy over Google Book Search to continue as long as Google fails to take my advice (:-) on creating a foundation and making the books openly available.

Google Books again

The ongoing debate about Google Books made it into the Observer yesterday. It picked up on Robert Darnton's argument that because books are our common heritage, their control ought not to be in the hands of a commercial organization.

Google's response to this really could be pretty straightforward: simply establish a not-for-profit "Google Foundation" and put access to Google Books under the Foundation.

But, you say, Google makes money from ads on the Google Books pages, so how would that work? Well, it could still work, all that would have to happen is for Google to pay into the Google Foundation some proportion of the ad revenue gained from Google Books and everyone would be happy. Since Google's unofficial motto is 'don't do evil' a solution like this would demonstrate, clearly, the desire to do good.

Is Google evil?

This is the title of a featured article in the current issue of the New Statesman. The concerns dealt with by the article include personal privacy (e.g., the row over Google's cameras patrolling towns and cities), the monopolistic trend of Google's online ad business ("the last time I looked, they were in their own right half the [online advertising] market. Search is traded as a dedicated marketplace, and within that they were almost the market.") and, of course, Google Books ("The endeavour is costing Google hundreds of millions of pounds and has won praise for its scope, but the deal includes clauses that could make it harder for anyone else to do the same.").

The authors conclude:

...on the fast-changing web, predictions about what Google and its peers will do next are often shots in the dark. We know a whole lot less about their plans than they do about us.

Perhaps that should make us feel a little uneasy?

Green Google?

The carbon footprint of Google has been a topic of debate recently. I first saw an item on the BBC site, which suggested that a Google search generates as much CO2 (7g) as boiling a kettle. Something disputed in the official Google blog, which claimed a figure 0.2g for a search - pretty big difference. The dispute spread through the blogosphere pretty rapidly and The Guardian newspaper stepped in to clear it all up - more or less - and then to enlarge on it further. It turns out that the physicist quoted never said what is claimed to have been said. Ah! The wonders of modern communications - you'd still get "three and fourpence for the dance".

Google competitor - really?

A new search engine called "Cuil" - the names get weirder and more unpronouncable! - is getting some publicity at the moment. It's been on the BBC Technology site and now Jack Schofield of the Guardian has an article on the subject. The article has generated quite a lot of discussion, which is worth having a look at. I can't say that I'm impressed: I've just tried searching for "information research" and it comes up with 'No results were found for: "information research"' Very strange! When I remove the inverted commas, I get results, but some of them are odd and I wonder if Information Research is actually scanned by the service. This feeling is increased when I search for titles of papers in the journal and find nothing - so perhaps the vaunted "biggest search engine" isn't really doing a very good job? There are also weird things going on, for example, a photograph is attached to the entry for this Weblog, but it isn't a picture of me! In fact, the same pictures are placed on the page in other places in relation to completely different topics - I've no clue as to what is going on here, but it doesn't fill me with either confidence or enthusiasm. I'll stick to Google.

Google's "Knol"

Today, Google has announced the public availability of "Knol" - described as a Web authoring system for creating longer length and, by implication, more serious bits of writing than are created on Weblogs.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

The items on the home page seem to show a bias towards medical issues, with articles on Carpal tunnel syndrome, Chronic stomach pain and Thoracic outlet syndrome. However their are also links to more mundane things, such as how to install a kitchen tap. The general idea seems to be that all is grist to the Knol mill.

Articles are signed and may be edited - but any edits have to be approved by the author(s). The obvious comparison is with Wikipedia and Citizendium - Knol appears to be more like the latter than the former and I imagine we may see the same persons contributing to all three. Of the three, however, Citizendium seems to have the better editorial control - which is why my own developing article on Information Management is there.

Google search technology

The Technologies Behind Google Ranking are the subject of an item in the Official Google Blog. The title is a little misleading, since the article tells us what the technology does rather what it is :-)

Microsoft blinks

So MSoft can't do everything after all. An article posted by the Website design company, Bluhalo, reports that the giant is giving up on the digitization of books for its version of Google's book search. This could put the Internet Archive in difficulties, since the Archive has been doing the digitization. No confirmation of this from anywhere, as far as I can see, so who knows?

Google book scanning...

...is the subject of an item at abc news, along with a video shot at the University of California. A couple of students praise the system for enabling access to research materials for which they would otherwise have to travel, and the librarians draw attention to the preservation function in California's disaster-prone environment.

Google search tricks

Lifehacker has a page of Google search tricks, some of which I'd heard of, others of which were new to me. Some will be quite time-saving: for example, simply putting an appropriate query into the Google search box will bring up a weather report for your post-code, or the exchange value among currencies.

Problems of privacy and Google Reader?

Like millions more, I guess, I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds and I've always found it perfectly satisfactory. However, hackles are being raised by Google's decision to allow the links you have shared with friends or family to be available to anyone. Now, this doesn't bother me, because I rarely share links, in fact, I think I've only done it once, but others might well be put off.

It doesn't stop there: if you are a GTalk user for chat, then the links will also be shared with anyone with whom you have chatted - again, I don't use GTalk, so it doesn't affect me.

Read Jack Schofield's column for the low-down.

Get a life at Google

At the Official Google Blog, Aseem Sood, Product Manager, Google Toolbar Team, writes:

I've started to notice something peculiar about the Toolbar team, and that's this: we literally can't seem to stop carrying the Toolbar around with us. When we moved to a new space in our Mountain View campus, we brought along a hallway-sized printout of it. For Halloween, eighteen of us dressed up as the different parts of the Toolbar itself.

Oh, how sad! :-( No pumpkin lantern, no trick or treat, just dressing up as Toolbar elements! I think this is the saddest thing I've read this week.

Google's experiments

Google's October newsletter points to new search developments. At Google Experimental you can try out, and give feedback on, a number of experimental features. These include a timeline presentation of results, a map view and the additional information view. There are also some keyboard shortcuts for navigating through search output and a couple of views that provide contextual navigation bars to the left or right of the search output. Of these, the timeline presentation and the keyboard shortcuts seem the most useful to me.