twopointouch

Dr. Sam Vaknin has been monitoring the results given by Google for 154 keywords since 1999. He’s allegedly discovered that changes in the way Google works since April 2006 have produced what he calls ‘unsettling’ results. He says incoming links from the MySpace social network appear valued very highly by Google’s search algorithm. The end result, he feels, is that content favoured by teens receives unwarranted favour from the search engine.

Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia” whose “editors” are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information. In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on.

MySpace whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google’s search results. It is very easy to spam MySpace. It is considered by some experts to be a vast storehouse of link farms masquerading as “social networks”.

Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace. Wikipedia visitors end up on various properties whose search technology is Google’s and Wikipedia would have shriveled into insignificance had it not been to Google’s relentless promotion of its content.

I’m not totally convinced by all of this. Though I do see the main point. I just don’t think it’s an issue.

(a) I’m not sure what Google’s vested interest is supposed to be in Wikipedia. I haven’t ever heard it mentioned before. However, we’ve all probably noticed that a Wikipedia link tends to be the first or second result on Google searches. I took that to indicate that people were linking to Wikipedia a lot, because it’s an easy way to gloss unfamiliar terms. The average net user probably doesn’t bother with academic publications and real [sic] encyclopaedias.

(b) I don’t know who these ‘experts’ are that say MySpace is a link-farm. I hadn’t noticed that.

(c) The age of MySpacers is in dispute, despite what Dr Vaknin says. Also, Google’s interest in MySpace is very much disclosed.

(d) No numerical evidence about the MySpace link is presented at all. No evidence for the claims about Wikipedians being teenage.

Ultimately, this piece smacks me as a bit paranoid. Young people use the web a lot and create a lot of content. Google works by measuring value through in-bound links. Of course young people are going to end up influencing search results.

P.S. There seems to be some sort of ongoing feud between Vaknin and Wikipedia. See here and here.

(via. Micropersuasion)

Quoted from Mr. Scoble (who is not specious):

“I do note that Google’s stock is up. Yahoo and Microsoft’s are down.”

The market believes this can work. Long-time readers will know that I am a believer in the Wisdom of Crowds. As the book says, when they’re properly orchestrated, the masses can make better decisions than experts. Stock Markets are not ideal examples of this, I think, since reputations and rumour holds sway; success breeds success and vice-versa, but they come close in some respects.

What made YouTube so madly successful? Clips from copyrighted TV? People doing crazy stunts? Talented pets? All of those things. What made YouTube work was that it was “the place”. It was the corner of the park after 7pm; it was the back of the bike sheds; it was where to go. It was where to waste some time; it was where to find stuff to stick on your page and mail to your friends.

The technology doesn’t matter; it never did. YouTube’s technology was ripped off a thousand times in the first year. Like others have said, though, you can’t clone a community. There may be a thousand digg clones, but there’s only one digg. YouTube has the community; none of the others do.

Lanjut →

Google has launched Gadgets for your Web Page. And why wouldn’t any self-respecting blogger want daily horoscopes, the current moon phase and a game of hangman by the side of their posts?

I think it really helps readers to get the most out of your writing if they can diddle about with an IP address lookup tool as they digest your latest outpouring. Nothing says ’sticky’ to me like a page that includes a local weather radar.

There are even plans for a Widget Conference. Apparently (and this is a complete lie), it is to be held in the car park of the San Francisco Public Library…

Time magazine interviews Eric Schmidt. Big thumbs up for the technologies Google is already pushing, as you might expect. Not too sure he answers the question, though…

Q. In what ways are all the new tech startups — the so-called Web 2.0 companies — changing the competitive landscape for Google?

A. Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and it’s not a term that I use, but the underlying rationale technologically is correct, which is why it’s really happening. The basic argument is, if you think about it: it would be better for you to have all the data and all the applications that you use on a server somewhere, and then whatever computer or device you’re near you would be able to use. Let’s say you have a PC or a Mac at home and at the office, and you have a BlackBerry and a portable and so forth and so on. You’re constantly moving files around. What happens if you drop your ThinkPad and break it?

It’s just a better model to have the computation and the applications use what we call a cloud, somewhere in the Internet. I, among other people, have been talking about this for 15 years, well before Google was founded. It turned out to be really hard to pull off. But now finally these broadband networks are fast enough that you can actually do it. You just don’t need to always have everything on your local computer. So what I like about Web 2.0, as it’s called, is that it’s really the popularization of all this different technology. The other thing that’s interesting about Web 2.0, as it’s expressed, is that there’s another way of making money, which is the advertising model.

My post on Saturday about prediction markets being a useful way to access collective intelligence brought a response from Gary of Tall Street. Tall Street is a new search engine which operates a form of stock market on search results. You search for and add sites to the system and invest pretend money in the sites you like or own. If other users click sites you’ve invested in, your stock increases in price.

They haven’t been Techcrunched or boingboing’ed as yet so the number of sites in the system is low, which limits the utility of the service. However, a search for ‘Search Engines’ has been pre-populated. It would be useful if there were a way to seed the system with results from another service. I also think real money would be an interesting addition. As it is, only the ongoing addition and betting on sites by sufficient users will reveal whether the model actually works. But I have to say.. it looks good on paper. Would I invest real money in Tall Street? No. But then I’m not an investor on the lookout for innovative new ideas.

Yes, it’s just another student project, and it looks a bit rough. But haven’t we seen something fitting that description before…?

Gary was also good enough to answer a few questions for me:

Lanjut →

For some reason, my request for a face-to-face interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuccessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appointment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my questions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attributed to a ‘Google spokesperson’. As I’ve said before, I think email interviews are less than satisfactory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty circumspect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-ordinating this.

How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?

Here at Google we have no single definition of web 2.0. For us, the development of our services rests on keeping creative and innovative, maintaining our focus on improving user experience, and our goal to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Lanjut →

It’s not important for you to know my name -
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me -
And what you give is what you get.

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will always remain.
If we get through for two minutes only,
It will be a start!
(The Jam, Start!)

There’s nothing like statistical rigor when it comes to research. And my little poll here is nothing like statistically rigorous. However, it’s been sitting there for more than two weeks while readers patently ignored it and it’s time to talk about the results. Anyway, it seems that it is at least as valid as a lot of the polls you read in the papers.

It’s good news for the Web 2.0 guys. While they were the least popular of the three options I presented, they still managed to garner six votes. Since the combined forces of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google only managed ten, I’d call that a pretty solid presence.

Lanjut →

The Register, ZD Net and PC Pro have all discovered a month-old transcript of an podcast featuring Tim Berners Lee made by IBM and published stories about it within a day of each other. Read/Write web published on the story over a week ago on August 22nd. Is this what they call ’social news’?

Anyway, they’re delighted that Sir Tim layed into Web 2.0 about it not being the computing revolution that it’s cracked up to be:

I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

The expression ‘Web 2.0′ was unfortunate. It makes a promise that it’s unlikely to deliver on - a web that’s twice as good, or fixed. If the other Tim, O’Reilly, had stuck to the expression ‘Infoware’, people wouldn’t get nearly so upset about the subject. He told me: “I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing [as Web 2.0], at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

If Web 2.0 has jumped the shark, then it’s because people find the expression either embarrassing or inviting of mockery. There have been a bunch of startups with fancy interfaces and questionable business models: that doesn’t make for a computing revolution. However, the things that these companies are heralding, what it really stands for - social software, online collaboration, social media, many-to-many communications - aren’t going to go away. As they become mainstream, their importance will start to have the sort of effects that might one day earn a 2.0 label.

And it looks like that’s happening. Check out Google’s new category addition on its news site (pictured).

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise UK reports an interesting phenomena on Google’s book search. The company may have started to offer PDF versions of out-of-print books, a very encouraging move to be sure. But a significant proportion of users go from directly from book search to book shops. Heather reports: “Last week, 15.93% of downstream visits from Google Book Search UK went to websites in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds - Books category.”

Sounds like good news for booksellers. “Google Book Search may be facilitating sales of Books.” Well, maybe.

Heather then goes on to give a picture of the people who follow this search path: “The 55+ age group was 69% more likely to be on Google Book Search than average for the UK internet population … The Types that are most highly over-represented on Google Book Search UK are really interesting as they represent young uni students and the elderly.” One thing that links many members of those two groups together is, of course, low incomes.

Google’s book search is, among other things, a low-cost way to gain access to books and to learn more about books you might consider buying. One great feature is links from the book lists to worldcat, which allows you to see which libraries in your area stock the book. Perhaps the 16% downstream from book search to book shops represents the people who are frustrated that they can’t get the works they want as a free PDF or loan it from a local library?

Elsewhere: Students Seek Alternatives as Textbook Prices Mount

and Google’s PDFs not very usable.

More blog entries on this subject than any other yesterday, with 1811 posts and counting, according to Technorati. Back in reality, here’s what alexaholic has to say about four of the best-known hosted office products versus one RSS aggregator service. Bear in mind that only 9% of US employees even know what RSS is.

alexa website statistics by alexaholic

Update: This graph doesn’t seem to work on Safari on an Mac, it seems. It shows there’s a lot more interest in bloglines than zoho, jot, 37Signals and even salesforce.com.

Now call me a narrow-minded sceptic if you will, but I’m not entirely convinced that we’re on the cusp of a computing revolution just yet.

P.S. Marc Fawzi from Evolving Trends is looking for a top-notch software developer to join his team in Silicon Valley. For some reason, he thought such people might come here.