Google executives have continuously emphasized that the company is in the search business and not in the content business. This assertion positions it as a neutral, valueless arbiter of efficient web search. However and with the growing sophistication of search algorithms, their role now appears to be much less neutral. The "values" mediated and executed by the invisible, Google search algorithms are commented on by Jonathan Stray in his blog (see: The editorial search engine). Below is an excerpt from his note. Read the whole thing it you have time -- it's worth the effort.
It’s impossible to build a computer system that helps people find or filter information without at some point making editorial judgements. That’s because search and collaborative filtering algorithms embody human judgement about what is important to know. I’ve been pointing this out for years, and it seems particularly relevant to the journalism profession today as it grapples with the digital medium. It’s this observation which is the bridge between the front page and the search results page, and it suggests a new generation of digital news products that are far more useful than just online translations of a newspaper. It’s easy to understand where human judgement enters into information filtering algorithms, if you think about how such things are built. At some point a programmer writes some code for, say, a search engine, and tests it by looking at the output on a variety of different queries. Are the results good? In what way do they fall short of the social goals of the software? How should the code be changed? It’s not possible to write a search engine without a strong concept of what “good” results are, and that is an editorial judgement.
I raise this topic now because there are critical, but often invisible, judgements implicit in every web search that we perform. There are significant implications in this thought, one of which is that Google executives have more power than the editors and publishers of print media. Having said this, I am not sure how I want to act on this conclusion. The evidence for this assertion is the smile, often internal, that we display when a Google search goes exactly right. By this I mean, we quickly find the information that we are seeking -- the perfect recipe, a departure time for a flight, or a summary of breaking news. This doesn't happen by accident.
In two recent posts, I discussed Zite, a e-magazine that intuits our favorite news and analysis topics by surveying the blogs and web sites that we enter into our news consolidator like Google Reader (see: Zite as an Example of the Future of E-Magazines; Zite Receives Cease-and-Desist Letter from Big Media). The app then creates a e-magazine with a table of contents that aligns with these personal tastes. But there is more. Under each of the items in this personal table of contents, it then fetches articles daily that continue to be interesting to me. How does it do this? There must be some "human curation" at work in the background to select high quality blogs and news publications on the web. It's much more efficient at this task than I could possibly be. My key function as a blogger is to provide an "intelligent filter" for my readers and serve up items and analysis that they find useful. The same goes for the people behind Zite. There is clearly thought,and therefore editorial judgement, at work in this app.
Very good write up and being a blogger I watch what happens out there and yes journalists do a great job in getting the initial story but how it goes from the original publication is a whole new hybrid world.
Blog bots are interesting creatures too that aggregate and create blogs and those make me crazy. I was bombed by a bot making comments on my blog and researched how these work as they are using search engine technologies and are just like trading robotic software one programs. I had someone again bomb my blog and they didn't do their programming too well and created some spam blogs that were not very complimentary for a CEO of a big investment firm and if they had not spammed me I would have been aware of the full sophistication of how this is used to even "spin" text as well, all automated.
Personally I would not use one as the backlink issues always come up especially with Google being on the hunt for them too. Good article here especially pointing out the judgments that are made as a result of connecting meta data and we can be presented with some very interesting stuff if not curated correctly.
Posted by: Barbara Duck | April 21, 2011 at 12:30 PM